I didn’t take any photos at this inspection, but I tried a new thing where I set up my phone camera and dictated what was happening while recording a video. It’s really hard to manipulate my phone for photos and voice memos while I’m wearing bee gloves. Maybe when I’m more experienced and switch to nitrile gloves this will be easier, but poking at my phone with leather fingers covered in propolis is just not working. When I got home I was able to listen to what I’d dictated and also watch a beautiful video of clouds slowly moving through the sky punctuated by occasional views of bees when I wanted to document something specific, like the location of a queen.

South Hive

I had been out a couple weeks ago to check on this one, since I’d previously had some concerns. I without a doubt saw a queen in there, and was even able to get a video of her roaming around. It was pretty exciting. I wanted to wait a little while to see if she’d lay some eggs. So I mainly wanted to check on that. Here’s what I saw:

• Frame 1 from the south: not a lot of bees
• Frame 2: bee bread on one side, not a lot of bees
• Frame 3: saw a drone hatching out of a cell
• Frame 4: this is where I saw the queen!
• Frame 7: nectar and honey
• Frame 8: honey, nectar, very heavy
• Frame 9: almost full of honey
• Frame 10: a little honey, but had a lot of room

I circled back to frame 4 to double check. I did see some eggs there, one per cell and centered at the top of the frame on the north side. So I’m not sure what’s going on with this queen, if she’s just not as prolific as she once was or if it’s a new queen learning the ropes. I’m going to continue to keep an eye on things. I thought I might add the second deep back, but the numbers still seemed small, so I did not.

North Hive

The north hive is exploding with bees. There was brood in various stages in both deeps, and they seemed to have decent resources as well. I saw pollen coming into the hive entrance. Maybe it’s a little early, but I did add a queen excluder and honey super to the north hive. I’ll give them a little time to figure it out and check to see what they’re doing in it either this weekend or next. I did see some brood I thought looked a little strange, maybe sacbrood, but nothing deeply alarming, so I’ll be keeping an eye on this too. They still had leftover fondant, but I removed this.