Checking In

Today I had to go refill the feeders on the hives. I went during the nice, warm, sunny part of the day. There was tons of activity going on around the hives. I had some trouble getting the smoker to lite. The pellets are a little harder to use than I had hoped. I ended up burning a lot of pine needles and grass. There was just enough of a breeze to blow the smoke right back out of the hive. I managed to get inside despite all the troubles. Gotta take a stinger at some point, I figured.

Here are some of the girls carrying in their loads of pollen. There were several different colors of pollen being brought into both hives.

The bees are working three frames. Doris keeps her hive very clean. I opened both so I could clean out the bottom boards of dead bees from the cold snap the other day. While Doris had already dealt with the housekeeping, Delores' bottom board was a huge mess. There were still many leftover bees. There was honey everywhere.

The folks at Plan Bee were generous enough to offer a frame of drawn comb full of honey to kick off these hives. They suggested splitting that frame of honey for the two hives. This loosened the honey and made a gigantic mess. The resulting honey mess saturated the bottom board. I dumped the wax, honey and bees off the bottom board and screen. I'm sure the bees will clean the remaining mess in time.

Interestingly, I found a bunch of sawdust all over the bottom of both hives. Its as if there is a crew of worker bees sanding away on the fresh cut lumber of these brand new hives.

 There are glimpses of pollen being stored in these cells.

This side of the frame looks like its being prepared for eggs. No sign of Doris in these pics. This frame was pulled from the edge of the cluster. Doris was probably in the center.

I did not prepare enough sugar water to fill the feeders completely. I am going to have to go back out this weekend and top them off for the week ahead. All signs are positive. They are officially off and running.

Today's lessons: Don't apply scraped honey to a new frame. It makes too much of a mess.
And: Smoker pellets are more trouble than they're worth.

Another good thing; no stings yet.

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