Over the course of the last 2 weeks, I’ve been starting to pull off fully-capped frames of honey from the supers. I’d put 3 supers on each hive, but the third super wasn’t getting a lot of action, and I started getting worried about nectar dearth and having the bees start eating the capped stuff. So I pulled the empty super off of Hive West, and checkerboarded in empty frames as I pulled out capped ones.
I ended up with 7 frames of capped honey a week ago, with 3 reserve western frames ready to be swapped in as more capped honey comes off.
For today’s inspection, I steeled myself to diving into the bottom box on Hive West; I hadn’t looked in there in over a month, and it was bothering me.
…
That was a waste of time.
The hive is doing fine, the bottom box has what you’d expect in it; some brood, some nectar, some pollen. The bees got real pissed off about the whole thing, and I had to go into the top brood box in order to find eggs anyway, so I won’t be checking the lower box again for quite some time.
It was tough to find eggs in both hives; I think they’re starting to contract the brood chamber a bit. I didn’t see any evidence of swarming, and I would expect swarming to be less likely with checkerboarded supers anyway. I left 3 checkerboarded supers on Hive East, and 2 on Hive West. Both hives are full of bees, looking healthy. There were no more fully capped frames today, although Hive West had 2 or 3 that were pretty close.
I’m leaving 3 supers on the one hive to see how the bees react to it. It seems like what they are doing is spreading out the work a lot more; there is honey in all 3 supers, but none of it is as far along as the stuff in Hive West.
Hive West, by contrast, seems a but more crowded; there were a lot of bees sitting on the top bars of even the uppermost super. They are doing a lot more concentrated effort to get the honey capped off, though, so I think that 2 supers is probably the way to go. Hive West still has about 5 super frames that are almost completely empty of comb, and there is a lot of space to draw out more comb. Hive East has way more empty foundation than they know what to do with. I may end up consolidating the supers back into 2 next inspection; hopefully they’ll have done some work drawing comb on the empty frames, so it’s not a total waste of time.
7 frames of blackberry honey in the bag.
A lot of red-bellied bees wandering around.
Several more capped frames on the way, probably 2 or 3 in West and another 2 in East.
It has been quite hot, and the inspection was around 6:30pm in full sweaty sun. The propolis was the consistency of peanut butter today. Really sticky peanut butter.
Oh, and I scared a rabbit as I was walking back in. I think it was munching on Kristi’s Cascade Berries…