Sunday, June 28, 2015

Full Hive = Added Box

During the past week, I've seen bearding around the front of the hive. This mostly happens in the evening after a couple of extra hot days of 100+degree weather. But now it's happening more during no-so hot days. I opened up the hive and it is full! Full of brood, honey & bees. Hive is two 10-frame mediums with 2 follower boards (so, 16 frames total). Pulling the outer side frames of the upper box showed heavy - mostly nectar and 20% capped honey. This is new (since I started giving fruit from near-by plum tree) I don't want them to run out of comb-space, so I decided to add another box. But with queen excluder under. The new box has spacers for 9 frames installed. These are added in pairs to the box before frames are installed - makes fatter honeycomb.


I pulled a natural comb frame out from the (old) top box and put it in the middle of the new top box, I also put empty frames on either side of it. The rest of the slots have new frames with foundation.

The goal is to not take very much honey - just a small clean sample then give back the rest and then pull the queen excluder. I want to be nicer to them this first year because of our 4 year drought here in northern california.

No ants at all around hive for quite a few weeks now. Only a couple of  'pincher bugs' and one silverfish.

We have something still blooming around here.  There is lots of pollen coming into hive  - is mostly white, some orange.

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