I joined Jenn for another bee inspection the other day. The main mission of this inspection was to do a “sugar shake” or sugar roll test to check for varroa mites; a common pest on all beehives. It’s a kinda amusing test — scooping about 300 bees into a jar, roll them in powered sugar, shake them vigorously, pour them out. Basically treating bees like liquid. Yeah, they get a little cranky at being scooped & shaken, but it doesn’t hurt them. 

We had a few mites, unsurprisingly, but not too many. We’ll do the treatment once the weather cools off; can’t do it in this heat.

We also removed the honey supers, since they need to build up supplies for their winter survival. We won’t harvest any honey this year, as expected, but if they survive the winter, they should be able to provide lots of honey next year.

A couple of nice combs of honey, for the bees to eat over winter:

Sugar-coated bees, returned to the hive after the test (don’t worry, the others will clean them off):

Worker bee cells:

More honey (from the other box), on a foundationless frame:

So pretty holding it up to the light: