Another inspection of the beehives, following up to last week.

Firstly, a peek at the bottom of the feeder removed last week, now with fewer bees on it:

A closer look; you can see a queen cup, and some bees further down, which have since departed:

We’ll scrape that comb off before using the feeder again. (If we do; we weren’t entirely satisfied with them, as the sugar syrup tended to get moldy, and bees would find their way around the screen and drown.)

On to the inspection. Here’s the yellow hive, with the new Flow super:

The inspection cloth on top to keep the bees calmer, and the rack ready to receive a removed frame. The grid on the right is the queen excluder, which prevents the queen from laying in the Flow honey super:

A nice frame of honey and worker brood; a typical pattern for frames near the edge:

A frame with a bunch of honey:

A brood frame covered in bees:

Another honey and brood frame:

Honey frame:

We didn’t see the queen in the yellow hive, though saw proof that she had been laying, which was good enough.

Moving on to the purple hive, here’s a frame of drone brood that we noticed last week:

We spotted the queen (the large non-stripy bee near the edge on the left, which is the bottom of the frame):

We removed the three drone frames:

And brushed the bees off them:

We set those drone frames aside, to let the remaining bees evacuate:

We replaced those frames with ones we had stored in our shop freezer over winter (and had since defrosted), that included some honey.

Some bees hanging out on Jenn’s suit:

This morning, I gave those drone frames to our chickens to enjoy; they’ll eat the unhatched drones and clean off the comb. We need to destroy the drone cells before using these frames again, otherwise they’d encourage laying more drones:

We also did mite treatments on the purple and orange hives. The orange hive is still looking weak, but surviving so far, so we didn’t disturb it too much.

We’ve completed the mite treatments now, so probably don’t need to inspect again for a couple of weeks, though need to keep an eye on the hives to give the purple hive more space if they need it, to prevent swarming. The yellow hive looks like they’re considering swarming, but they have plenty of space with the Flow super, so hopefully they won’t.