Wednesday, May 26, 2010

A peek under the lid

My mum says I need an electric fence to keep me out of my beehives...

I had a quick peek under the top covers today, and since Meg's second box is over 80% drawn out, I added a third. Meg has brood in both of the first two boxes, and some great heavy uncapped frames of honey/sugar water.

Jo is worrying me a bit. After adding a second box, I think the population has contracted (or more bees than usual were out foraging) and there are only 6 frames of bees at this point. They've actually stopped clustering around a couple frames of drawn comb! There's a significant amount of capped brood though, so the population should be growing in the next couple weeks, and I am convinced that if I just leave it alone, they'll slowly build up to strength. I might have to feed them much more than Meg to go into winter with enough food to last until April, but unless there's some bad disease I'm missing, Jo should be fine.

One more interesting note, both hives suddenly became sticky with propolis this week. This is expected, but I find it interesting that after a month with no noticeable propolis, they both got sticky at the same time within a week or so. There must be some source of sap that suddenly became appealing.

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