Second Inspection

We did our second hive inspection last week. We check every week through most of the summer to make sure everything is alright and to know when to add honey supers as they run out of room. If you don't give them more space, they will swarm and half your hive will leave. At this point in the season it would be hard to recover from this.
I spilled a little sugar syrup as I took the feeder out. Bees are so funny, "Hey - what are you doing in our hive. What's this?? Sugar!!" and they stop caring what you do. They are literally driven by sugar.



They are collecting pollen and nectar. I meant to take a picture of the latest burr comb we removed, you can see the layers of pollen. They smash it into a cell until it is full. Aaron tasted some of it, one type tasted like garlic, the other like mint.


They are beginning to cap the sugar water from the feeder that they have made into honey - that means at this point it is ready to be stored for later.


Here is our queen. She was doing everything she could to hide from us, she did not like being out of the hive.


If you blow this picture up, and look very, very closely, you can see 1-2 day old larvae in the cells. We are inspecting again tomorrow and should be able to see larvae very clearly now.


At the end Aaron gave them a powdered sugar bath. They didn't like it too much, but I did see a big increase in mites that had dropped down onto the sticky board after, so that's good.