Bee inspection & treatment

Yesterday we did another beehive inspection and mite treatment.

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

Pulling apart beehive

A bunch of bees on top of some frames:

Bees on top of frames

Jenn inspecting a frame:

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:

Closer look at honey

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:

Bees

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:

Bees

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

Drone brood

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

Worker brood

A closer look at bees on a frame:

Bees

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

Smoke

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:

Added Flow super

Bee closeup:

Bee closeup

Another closeup; you can clearly see the pollen sacs:

Bee closeup