We had a really busy weekend, and in the middle of it, we saw a swarm of bees leaving the bee yard. We initially supposed that it was Hive North, because the swarm was in that area, but we couldn’t be certain, and knew that we needed to do an inspection.
We’d been putting off inspections for the past couple of weekends; I’d been off fishing, and things are starting to get busy in the weeks leading up to the start of the school year. So, it had been a bit since we’d inspected the bees (three weeks?)
We suited up, set up the smoker for a long burn, and got started.
First up was Hive North (which we assumed had been the swarming hive). What we found is that they, indeed, look ready for a honey super, but they essentially have a pretty good-looking hive. Lots of capped brood, lots of eggs, lots of brood in various stages of development. No signs of swarm cells. They just need a little more space, but I doubt they’ll have the time to actually cap any honey this year. Maybe we’ll give them 5 frames or something.
Second, we decided to do Hive East. Hive East is having problems. There are a boatload of drones in the hive; we were easily able to spot anywhere from a small handful to over a dozen wandering around on almost every frame in the brood chamber. The honey supers are starting to show a lot of darker honey (which we assume is knotweed), and there are a few frames that have really quite a bit of capped honey; probably 2 or 3 frames total of capped honey (although spread out over 6 frames or more). At least one of the frames in the honey super had brood cells in it. As we started digging into the brood chamber, we found about 4 deep frames of capped honey, and then started seeing what we were looking for; some swarm cells. At least one of the swarm cells was open, so we assume there’s a virgin queen wandering around in there killing off the other queen larvae.
I’m really glad that we had two hives at the beginning of the year, because if we’d only had Hive East, we wouldn’t have had a basis for comparison. Hive East has been the weakest hive in the bee yard all year, always seeming to reel from one disaster to the next. And now the hive has swarmed twice, taking a purchased queen with them each time. With the number of drones in the hive, they are either making their last ditch effort to save themselves, or they’re already dead (with laying workers) and don’t know it yet. We didn’t see any eggs. Hive East needs to recover, and I don’t know if there’s enough warm weather left for them to do it.
We then moved on to Hive West, my personal favorite hive. The upper super had 2 full frames of capped honey. There were several more frames that were “almost” fully capped, but there were so many of them that we decided to be picky and only call frames where both sides were 80% or more capped to be complete. The lower super had no fully capped frames, but a lot of knotweed mixing in, and quite a bit of capped honey, just no full frames. About the time we were opening Hive West, I saw a worker dragging a drone bodily out of the hive, it was all very aggro.
We dug down into the upper brood chamber (it’s been awhile since we’ve inspected the lower brood chamber in West — we’ve stopped short in both recent inspections), and found essentially textbook brood patterns in the brood chamber. There are still a couple of fully capped honey frames at the outer edges, but inside that are perfect semicircular brood patterns, with capped honey and pollen ringing them around the edges. Lots of eggs, lots of larvae, and plenty of capped brood for this time of year. Hive West seems to have recovered from the swarming (which, as you recall, produced Hive North) with aplomb. The hive looks strong, and has a lot of honey stores.
Things looked so good in Hive West, in fact, that we decided to swap out some fully-capped frames for empty-but-pre-waxed frames from the spare super, our first honey harvest of the year.
We went back through all four honey supers, and decided that there were 3 Western frames worth taking, one from Hive East (which was done on one side and about 70% done on the other), and two from Hive West.
We were being very picky on Hive West; if we’d taken the frames that were 70% done on one side, we’d probably have had 2 or maybe 3 more frames. There are also several deep frames of capped honey in each hive, perhaps as many as 8 total. We left all those alone.
We’re still on the fence about what to do with all the deep honey.
We took the capped frames inside, and Kristi scraped away the open cells of honey on the frame from Hive East. We ate that over dinner rolls for dinner. Best. Honey. Ever.
To do list:
– Hive East has swarmed (for the second time), and there are swarm cells in the hive. Leave it alone for 2 weeks to see if the new queen can get going before winter.
– Hive North needs a honey super. They are almost fully built out in the upper box, and the lower is getting to the “put on some more room” point, too.
– Hive West seems to be in perfect shape. We need to take the blackberry honey we want, and let them move forward through their fall preparation.
– We need to figure out how to extract the honey we have (Kristi is a fan of just scraping the frames), give the extracted frames back to the bees for cleaning, and decide how to get the hives situated for winter.