Spring Cleaning and 3 New Hives

I've been a bit crazy since adopting a new child (yay!) but I still manage to make some time for the bees.

Mid-April, I opened up Meg and Jo to make sure the bees were near capped honey so they weren't in danger of starving.  Even if there's honey in the hive, if it gets too cold, and they bees are forced into a small ball to keep warm, they may starve with honey just a few inches away as they stay put to try to keep their brood warm!

Both hives were clustered in a great spot near plenty of honey, so I just took off the winter cover and swept out a couple of inches of dead bees that had collected over the winter.  Last weekend, my dad was kind enough to reverse the hives -- swapping the top and bottom of the three medium boxes to push the queen's brood rearing back down to the bottom.  This helps organize the remaining space for the year's honey collection and harvest.

On  April 23, my dad and I traveled out to our new location in Afton where Jen and Lucia have kindly allowed me to put up three hives on their property!  We built a simple fence to keep their dogs from getting too close and installed three 3lb packages of bees with MN Hygenic queens.  All three hives have one box of drawn comb from last year, a second box of foundation (undrawn honeycomb) and two boxes on top holding a small feeder jar.

Today, I went out to make sure the queens were laying, and I found all three hives had eggs, and at least one of them had capped brood in it!  I'll have to make a regular pilgrimage to the apiary as it was really nice to take a long lunch break (the apiary is MUCH closer to work than home).  I removed the feeders and found that each hive was well established in the bottom box and none of them had started drawing out comb in the second box.

Here's a couple more pictures.  First, the collection of bees on top of the first box of one hive, and
second, some eggs and larvae on a frame after I blew on them a little to get the girls to move out of the way.

Babies in my honey!

The first picture is a wonderful frame full of honey and about half cured and capped. The bees take nectar from flowers, stick it in the cells, and then process it and evaporate moisture until it's under about 18% water. When the honey is finished curing, the bees add a protective layer of wax to preserve the honey until it's needed.

The second picture is from middle of the same box -- apparently the queen has moved up into my honey supers and is using them for her bee-making activities! I suspected this might happen when the bees filled so much of the bottom two boxes full of frames of pollen, but I was hoping there was still enough room down below to keep the queen happy.

On one hand, this is awfully inconvenient as I won't be able to just steal supers of honey off the top of the hive, I'll have to go through and carefully mix and match frames of honey when I take it off for the winter. On the other hand, I was a bit worried about crowding at the bottom of the hive, and that the bees are using middle frames all the way up for brood rearing suggests that I won't have to worry as much about swarming (although that should be largely finished by now). Practically, I'd have to go through the hive frame by frame anyway, and ensure that I leave enough honey and space for honey so the bees don't starve in the winter.

This development does somewhat dampen my optimism about the honey crop this year. It looks like there will be a lot of honey, and I'm sure the hive has at least 50 pounds stored away already, but I'm hoping to leave 80-90 pounds for the winter and without a more accurate count of individual frames I just don't know what to expect.

In the future, I could use a queen excluder to keep the queen out of the honey supers, but I'm leaning toward letting her roam -- if the brood boxes get stopped up with pollen and honey, I'd rather have her move up than force the hive to swarm, and I'm not working enough hives that it's a HUGE inconvenience to swap back frames of brood when the time comes to harvest the honey.