Yesterday we did another beehive inspection and mite treatment.

Here’s the yellow hive pulled apart to inspect and treat the bottom brood box:

A bunch of bees on top of some frames:

Jenn inspecting a frame:

A closer look at at that frame, which has lots of capped honey on the sides, and uncapped honey in the middle:

Inspecting another frame, with a practice queen cup aka swarm cell visible hanging off the bottom. If the bees ran out of room, they’d use these to grow a new queen, and the old queen would take half of the bees and go find somewhere else to live, aka swarming. The bees make these as an insurance policy when things are going well, so isn’t usually anything to worry about:

We did see the queens for both hives, which was gratifying. Though I didn’t get good pictures of either.

A bunch of bees on the edge of a frame:

Inspecting a frame with a lot of drone brood (the lumpy cells):

And a frame with worker brood (the flatter cells):

A closer look at bees on a frame:

Smoke across the top to get the bees to go down, so we can add another box without squashing them:

We added a queen excluder and the Flow super, to start collecting some honey.  It’ll probably take them a while to start up there, since they have space below, but it’s good to make sure they have plenty of room when there is good nectar flow:

Bee closeup:

Another closeup; you can clearly see the pollen sacs: