Second Hive Check

Opened the hive.  My bees were very happy today.  They ate most of their pollen patty.

My bees drank a gallon of sugar water (the whole thing), but we only gave them half a gallon of sugar syrup because we only brought a gallon of sugar syrup and my parent's hive needs sugar syrup too.  I will take more out to them in a couple of days.

Look at all the pretty capped brood in my hive.

I found my queen today, unlike last weekend. If you can't find the queen let me give you a hint:  She's right there.  If you still can't see her click on the picture to make it bigger.  She is also bigger than the others and is a different color.

There was some burr comb, but not as much as in my parent's hive.  They had five supersedure cells in their hive.  I didn't have any supersedure cells in my hive because my bees like me.  My mother says that's because they haven't met me yet.

I had to put on another box so that my bees have more space to put brood and honey,  but mostly brood.  We pyramided to make sure that the bees don't just stay in the bottom of the hive.  And yes, I do understand that my top bee box isn't painted.  The reason that is is because I forgot to paint it, even though mom has been telling me I need to paint my bee boxes for a while now.

My hive being closed up after it's all said and done.
Unlike what my mother's blog says I only hip checked my father to the side once.

Bee pokemon.

Bee Pokemon.

First Hive Check

Checked the hives today.

My bees were fairly relaxed when I opened my hive.

I found some excess burr comb.

The queen cage was empty when we looked at it.  I did not find my queen though.

I found lots of larvae and eggs.  I stopped looking for the queen because the temperature was dropping and I didn't want to chill the brood.  I added half a gallon of sugar syrup and half a pollen patty to the hive before I closed it up.

After finishing my hive, my parents said that I butted in and took over doing their hive, or so they say.

Even though I did not find my queen, I found my parent's queen.

After that I took over installing my parent's other colony that they planned to install today.

The gentle way of installing bees because the temperature and the weather was turning for the worst.

Installing the Package

Getting hive assembled.

Getting hive ready for bees and feeder.

Matthew puts feeder in my hive.  Good weather so far.

 

Getting all the bees off of the queen cage.

Installed the package today.  The bees don't like being put in the hive on a rainy day.  The weather wouldn't make up it's mind.  First it was all sunny, then as soon as we got the equipment out and ready to assemble the hive and put them together really quick, it started hailing.  So we sent Matthew back to the house to get the big umbrella and we just kept going.  And get this as soon as we finished installing both my mother's and mine bees and were going back to the house the weather started to get better.

Picking up the Package

Picked up the bees today.  We got the package because Franclyn said that there was one package that broke and so the excess bees just flew onto other boxes.  And she said that the box with the most bees on the outside probably had the best queen because of pheromones.