Bee Check

We made a bee check this weekend and were mostly pleased with what we saw. Above, you can see the bees using the top feeder to eat sugar water.  They crawl up through an access hole, over a wooden wall, and down to the water.  Somehow one or two bees still manage to get into the large pool and drown, but for the most part, the feeder works pretty well. We noticed some mold on the inside wall of the feeder, so we will ask about that at our next bee meeting.

 In this picture you can see that the bees are mainly in the center frames of the hive.  On top of their frames is a grease patty they eat to help them manage mites.

 We noticed on this visit that our ten frames still allow some space in between each one.  The bees can't stand the space and fill it up with extra comb. Above, you can see a large example that fell off when we removed a frame to examine.

Brave Husband (who didn't even wear gloves on this visit) holds up a frame to check.  In the sun, wearing a veil, it is hard to see what is really going on inside this frame; but thanks to modern technology, we were able to enlarge this photo on the computer and look inside some of the cells.  We were very pleased to see eggs and larvae which means that our queen is laying!