Second beehive inspection of 2020

One week after the first beehive inspection of the year, we inspected again, to make some tweaks, and continue the mite treatments.

Yesterday I modified our new Flow box and cover; the access door on the Flow box was sticking, and the roof was hitting the handles of the top panel, so I used my router to trim them to work better (not particularly tidy, but works):

Modified Flow box and cover

Today we removed the feeder from the yellow hive; we had left that in place in case the queen was in there. There were still lots of bees on the bottom of the feeder, but we shook most of them into the hive; the remainder will fly back this afternoon, then I’ll be able to take the feeder away tomorrow:

Yellow hive: bees on bottom of feeder

A broken queen cup stuck to the top of a frame (it would have been built hanging off the frame above):

Broken queen cup

A decent frame of brood:

Brood frame

We didn’t see the queen, so hopefully she’s in there somewhere. We’ll look again next week.

We also put the new Flow super on, with a queen excluder, to give them more room for honey:

Flow super

On to the purple hive, we transferred the frames to a new box, since the blue box had a bit of a gap:

Transferring frames to a new box

Looking at the upper box, there’s some good brood frames:

Brood frame

But also a lot of drone frames, which we’ll remove next week:

Drone frame

We also took a peek in the orange hive. It’s still alive, so we just did the treatment without disturbing it too much:

Orange hive

So here are the current state of our hives — two gone, one weak, one with too many drones, and one looking good, though no queen sighting:

The hives

We’ll inspect again next week, weather permitting.