Excluding the bees

I went out to the hives a few weeks ago and have not gotten around to posting a few pics. This post is for last week and this week.

Here is my hive with a queen excluder on it. As I looked in the hive to see how they were doing and how much honey they were making, I noticed that there were maybe only a dozen bees in the honey super. I did not like that. It had been on for two weeks and nothing :( I thought that maybe they needed a different entrance to the hive to deposit their honey quicker. So I offset the honey super to give them that alternate entrance. The other hive is looking really well too, I just need to get another excluder.

Well the next week I finally got the other exluder and put it on. Still not honey in the other hive :(

This week I went to check on them and some good things were happening. I looked into the hive on the left and again no honey:( So I decided to try something out. I decided to take off the queen excluder and try to invite the bees to go into the super by spraying the empty frames with sugar water. I also put 2 frames of honey from the lower boxes into the honey super. The lower boxes where chalk full of bees. In just a matter of minutes there were tons of bees in the honey super. I think that was a good move. In the other hive the bees seamed to be doing OK with the queen excluder in place. I think I will leave it there for a little while longer.

The white part of the frame is freshly capped honey :) I cant wait to eat some!

So as I was working with the bees I did not realize that I accidentally put something in front of the entrance to the hive. Well to say the least, the bees were not happy. There were so many bees flying around the entrance that it kinda got scary. As soon as I cleared the entrance it was like a funnel of bees. It was amazing!

Time for the honey super

Last year I did not get any honey from my bees. That was a sad year. I was only able to get the two brood boxes on the hive. This year however, things are going much better. I am ready to add a third box called the honey super. basically anything that goes into the honey super is what I get to keep. Yummy!

When I arrived I noticed the difference between the two hives. The one on the left has a ton of bees on the front entrance, where as the one on the right just has a few. The left one is stronger and more crowded.

This is going to be really hard to see but if you zoom in to the center of the image really close you can see lots of cells that have uncapped larva at different stages. I think it looks cool.

This is interesting, the whole frame is capped brood except for the center. It looks like they are filling it with honey. what that tells me is that there is a big honey flow going on right now. When the bees hatched and cleaned out their cells the other bees needed some place to put there honey. Normally the brood fills most of the frame with the top few inches filled with honey.

This metal grate looking thing is a queen excluder. What it does is it allows the worker bees to travel to the honey super to deposit that liquid gold and it keeps the queen out of that box so she does not lay any eggs there.

Here are my hives now, the one on the left has the honey super and the queen excluder on it. the one on the right will be getting the same thing in a week or two.

The grass has grown so tall that it is hard to see my hives let alone get to them.

Here I am hiding in the grass. Can you find me?

May Bees

So I forgot to post about my bees last time I went out to check on them. Here are some pics.

Here Are my hives! The other people who have bees near mine were very nice and cut down the weeds in front of the entrances so the bees can get out easier.

Here is a look inside one hive with a few frames removed. The were building up a lot of burr comb between the boxes (kind of hard to see in the pic). I scraped it out and saved it in a container for later.

Here is some burr comb at the bottom of the frame, it looks cool but not that efficient for the bees.

Here is looking in the other hive, they don't have very much honey comb built up yet.




This was taken 2 weeks later
Here is a pic of one of the frames that has a lot of capped cells with brood in them. If you look close you can see open cells that have larva in them to the left of the capped cells (they will be capped very soon). Once the larva matures, bees will come out of the cells.



I think I will be able to put on my first honey super on one of the hives, it is doing really really well. the other one may be another week or so more.