Today we did an inspection of the beehives. This was a big inspection of all four of the hives, plus we removed the honey supers on the two that had them (no more honey harvested), tested for mites, added mite treatments, added pollen patties, and added sugar syrup feeders.

Here’s Jenn inspecting the purple hive, with the test equipment and liquid smoke:

A nice frame of brood, with honey in the top corners:

The purple hive always gets really cranky when opened up. Here you can see lots of bees swarming around Jenn:

I recently put the mobile cam over by the beehives, as an experiment, so it captured us doing our inspection (you may be able to see the cloud of bees behind Jenn here too):

A selfie with several bees around me:

I got stung today, too; the first time I’ve been stung during an inspection. I stepped away from the hives to activate my phone camera, and one got me on the back of the hand as soon as I took off my glove. I can barely see the sting point at present, or feel it much, but it’ll probably swell up over the next day.

Here are bees on top of a box. You can see some white ones in the middle; they are coated in powdered sugar from the sugar shake mite test. The other bees will clean them off:

The bees have pollen patties to help feed them for the winter:

Here’s another cam shot of our inspection:

Scraping off the top of frames, to keep them tidy and easy to access:

A very nice comb of honey (for the bees winter supplies):

Lots of bees and honey:

The hives are now in winter mode; we’ll do more inspections and mite treatments over the next few weeks, to help them get ready for winter. We’ll also continue to feed them sugar syrup and pollen patties, to help them survive the coming cooler weather when they can’t go out and forage.