Inspection With My Wife

My wife joined me today in an inspection of Meg and Jo! I thought she was just less interested in beekeeping, and I didn't want to push it (it could be argued that I spend too much time with my girls as it is). However, she made it quite clear to me last week that she's only been holding back because she feels like she needs to take care of our baby Brennan while I'm looking at bee-covered frames. We got her sister to watch Brennan while we were inspecting and we had a great time!

We didn't have a ton of time, so we never got around to finding the queens, and we didn't get any good pictures from Jo, but we had a great time watching the girls work.



Meg is doing great and is about half done drawing out the third medium frame. This hive has about a dozen frames of capped brood with a great pattern, and a whole lot of honey/syrup being cured and capped around the brood. We may yet get some significant amount of honey from this hive, although it might ultimately depend on whether I decide to leave them 3 or 4 mediums of honey for the winter (roughly equal to 2 or 2.5 deeps).

One interesting thing I noticed was a frame of 80% pollen with occasional larvae or capped brood where the queen found an open cell. I love all the different colors! This abundance of pollen probably explains why they've largely ignored the single pollen patty I gave them early in the year -- our location must be great for pollen, I just hope it's as great for nectar collection!

Jo is still lagging significantly. The hive is still largely confined to the first box, and I'm still worried about them building up by winter. They're not taking much (if any) syrup, and while brood patterns now look good and I can't find anything else wrong with the hive, there could always be something I'm missing that is preventing their successful expansion.

Given Meg's great progress, I took a frame of capped brood from Meg and added it to Jo's brood chamber. The capped brood take very little maintenance, and when they emerge, they'll add hundreds of new bees ready to draw out comb for future generations. To do this, I had to knock all the bees off the frame first so they didn't get in cross-hive fights inside the hive. I bumped the frame sharply on the ground, then wiped off all the remaining bees with some long grass. It was fun to watch all the bees fanning their Nasonov glands at the entrance to guide the poor nurse bees home. The nurse bees were initially clumped up together, but I prodded them a bit, and they all started marching straight home!

Tomorrow, I'll return with some new syrup for both Meg and Jo (Meg is almost out and Jo's is a bit old as they aren't taking it).