A quick post on last weekend’s beehive inspection.

We added a Ross round honey super to the yellow hive, one of the overwintered ones, to try to get some comb honey. This super has frames with plastic round shapes, in which the bees draw out comb and make honey, then they can be easily separated and packaged as round comb honey:

Next we inspected one of the two new hives. This was concerning: we didn’t see the queen (which isn’t all that uncommon), but also didn’t see eggs. While there was plenty of capped brood, and larvae, nothing younger than a week old. We also saw some possible emergency queen cups, like in the center of this picture. So it’s possible the queen didn’t survive the installation of the hive; either we didn’t get one with the nuc, or she got squashed or something in transferring to the new hive:

We’ll inspect again this weekend to see what’s happened.  They may make a new queen, or maybe we just missed her.

A closeup of bees on a frame:

Treatment and temperature sensor:

On to the purple hive, there was a strange formation on one of the frames; not sure what that’s about:

We spotted the queen; she is even marked, which makes her easy to see:

We also added a scale to the Flow hive. This lets us monitor the weight of the hive, in addition to the temperature, which helps indicate the amount of honey, among other things:

All four hives:

Some removed boxes between the hives, left there for a day for the bees to evacuate: