I had wanted to inspect the hives earlier in the week, but the schedule conspired against me, and it didn’t happen until the weekend. I inspected Hives North and West by myself on Saturday, and Kristi and I did a honey super inspection on Hive East on Sunday.
The blackberry nectar flow seems to be tapering off; up on the hill, we still have some flowers, but down in the valley, most of the vines have fruited out. Kristi noticed that knotweed is also starting to bloom down in the valley. I have also started noticing bees on the clover this weekend; I think it was finally hot enough that the clover started producing nectar.
I inspected Hive North first. It’s the first inspection for the hive, and so I didn’t really know what to expect. As I started looking into the upper deep, I was thinking that they might need a honey super; the upper brood chamber is almost fully built out, with bees working on 8 or 9 of the frames. I didn’t see the queen, I didn’t see any evidence of eggs, but I get the idea that the hive is way behind and just playing catch-up right now.
Then I moved to the lower brood chamber, and I figured out what was going on — the lower chamber is almost completely unworked. The bees all moved to the upper chamber first. Ah, ha. This is probably why you put the brood chambers on one at a time. 🙂 So, I swapped the two boxes, and closed things back up.
I moved on to Hive West. I need to read up on the swarm/virgin queen thing again, but what I saw was that there is a lot of honey moving into the supers. There is some capped honey in the upper super (not a full frame’s worth yet), and about 4 or 5 frames worth of capped honey in the lower super. There are also 8 frames of capped honey in the brood chamber (the outer 2 frames on each box is full of honey). The brood chamber is starting to get back from “honey bound” to “normal looking”, there are large sections of empty brood cells, with capped honey and a bit of pollen out near the edges, just like you’d expect. However, there’s essentially no brood. I saw maybe one frame of larvae, and no eggs. It’s still perhaps a little early for the virgin queen to have started laying, and of course I’m not sure what the brood pattern should look like for a hive that’s getting to the end of the summer. I swapped the supers around, to give the bees a little more incentive to work on the lower box, and maybe move up some more of the honey from the brood chamber. In all, Hive West looks like our best honey producer, but it’s not clear that the hive has quite recovered from the swarm event.
Finally, we did a mini-inspection of Hive East. The upper honey super is still nearly unworked; we moved up a couple of frames of honey from the lower super to get them to come up there. There was some brood mixed in a couple frames of the lower super, and we found the queen (yellow spot) in the lower super. This hive is behind a little on capping honey; I don’t think there were more than 3 or 4 frames of capped honey in the lower super. We didn’t open up the brood chamber; we’d already seen the queen, so we decided to leave well enough alone. If I recall from the previous inspection, there were 6-8 frames of capped honey in the brood chamber (same as Hive West).
In summary, we will definitely get honey this year, especially if we feed the bees this winter (and thus can take the honey out of the brood chamber). There is not a single hive that’s running perfectly right now, although I would say that Hive East is probably looking the most stable.
For next time:
Hive North – Check both brood chambers to see if they’re built out. I doubt they’ll need a super this year, although we have one ready for them.
Hive West – We probably need to start rotating the capped honey either up into the upper super, or out of the hive completely. It would be nice to see the queen or some eggs.
Hive East – Haven’t inspected the brood chamber recently.