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):

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:

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

A decent frame of brood:

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:

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

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

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

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

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:

We’ll inspect again next week, weather permitting.