Over the weekend we had an epic three-hour beehive session, plus a quick half-hour one the following day. A lot went on: we inspected all five of the hives, harvested 9 quarts of honey from the Flow hive, removed one box full of honey frames, put a bee escape on another hive to take a box from them (15 medium frames total), did mite counts and treatments, added a new feeder box, found and removed queens from two hives, and replaced the queens (the next day). Read on for details.

Firstly, we started the Flow harvest:

While that was underway, we checked the new “hot pink” hive; it seems to be doing well, though we have concerns on whether or not it has enough honey stored to survive the winter; we might provide extra frames of honey to help them along:

We did the sugar shake mite test on each of the hives. Here’s a jar of sugary bees:

Jenn doing the mite test:

A frame of honey from the yellow hive; this is from a box that we will harvest, cutting the foundationless frames into comb honey, and extracting from the foundation ones:

We wanted to replace the aging queens on the yellow and Flow hives, so the trick was to find them. Here’s the queen on the yellow hive — look for the one with minimal stripes towards the bottom, right of center:

We put that frame and one other in a nuc box, along with some empty frames, as a backup in case the new queens don’t “take”:

A close-up of bees on top of frames:

We also added a bee escape board between the brood boxes (the bottom two) and the honey supers (the top two). This is a special board that includes a triangular route that bees can go out but apparently can’t find their way back in (see a picture of it later). This is an easy way to get the bees out of the honey boxes, so we can remove them:

An essential tool, the smoker:

Checking in on the Flow harvest:

We covered the jars to prevent lazy bees from trying to collect the honey, and ending up drowning in the jars:

A very nice full frame of honey from the purple hive, from another box that we’ll harvest:

Jenn brushed off the bees, since there weren’t all that many (and we don’t have a second bee escape), so we could take the box away immediately:

The orange hive is rather engineering challenged; they have a lot of cross-combing, which gets torn apart when removing the frames:

They were rather cranky at our critique of their engineering talents; we had to take long walks to get them to stop trying to kill us:

We also found and removed the old queen from the Flow hive; here’s her nuc box, again with two frames from the hive, plus empty ones:

After finishing harvesting, we removed the Flow box, and left it on the ground for them to clear out of it:

We received the two new queens, enclosed in queen cages along with some attendants, and a block of candy for the bees in the hive to slowly eat through, while getting used to their new queen:

The next day, preparing a queen cage for installation in the hive:

I didn’t get any pictures of the queen cage in place, since I had to help position it; it’s basically jammed between two frames.

A Mite Away Quick Strips treatment on a couple of hives that needed it, without new queens:

We went back at night to collect the Flow box, but there was an unusual amount of activity, and bees still active inside the Flow box:

So I added the escape board to the Flow box, so they can clear out. You can also see the five hives reduced to their winter configurations of just brood boxes. All the honey the bees collect for the rest of the year is for them to store to eat during winter. Oh, and the white box on the hot pink hive is a feeder tray, with big troughs for sugar syrup, that the bees can access from inside the hive. A higher capacity than the old feeder jars, and less prone to robbing by bees from other hives:

Here’s a closer look at the bee escape board, with some bees heading out:

Finally, bearding bees on a hive with the mite treatment; an expected behavior: