6/10/2010: Fifth Inspection

Conditions: Sunny, 76F
Present: Bud F. and I
Equipment: Removed 5 frames from shallow super on old hive and replaced with new frames of blank foundation due to excessive drone. Removed pail top feeder from new hive and added a honey super.
Activities: Smoked hives about 2:00pm. Inspected many frames.
Observations:

Old hive:

Notice a bunch of drone cells and little food in the lower (shallow) chamber since reversal. The bees have not been storing food here, and all brood is drone. We removed 5 frames of comb with high numbers of drones or empty drone comb and left 5 frames in that had honey, brood, or nothing, but were of normal cell size (not drone comb). 5 frames of foundation were added to allow drawing of comb and storage of food. This is a minor setback which did not allow for supering this hive with a honey super. I mixed up one more batch of sugar syrup to continue feeding until the new frames are fully drawn out.

In the deep, which was on top, we saw tons of bees, brood, and quite a bit of capped honey. The queen was spotted on a frame with lots of open cells, moving to a part of the hive to keep the laying going. She’s doing great laying in her second year and I don’t know whether or not to requeen in the fall. Some people (certainly queen breeders) recommend re-queening every year. The population was larger here than the new hive, which is to be expected. We reversed the chambers again to have the shallow super on top and encourage the building of comb by having those frames close to the pail top feeder. Hopefully the queen will stay down in the deep chamber now that there is lots of food and brood on the deep frames. Perhaps in a week or two we can super?

With all the reversing and pulling and re-pulling frames to decide whether or not to keep them we had this hive open a long time, maybe 20 minutes. The bees were good, but you could tell they were growing impatient with us the longer we were in there. No stings, but I changed from bare-handing it to wearing gloves as we went. I was pretty sure I would have gotten a sting (or several) if I kept at it without gloves.

New hive:

The upper (shallow) super was full of bees and capped honey. The lower (deep) had plenty of brood in a good pattern. So we removed the feeder and added a honey super! We did not pull every frame just to see the queen, so she went unspotted. Based on the young larvae and capped brood, she’s laying just fine. I hope to see this queen soon, though. Funny that I keep spotting the unmarked queen but haven’t found the marked queen yet. No reversals for this hive this season as they started in just a deep and I added the shallow from the other hive after that. The pollen patty was nearly fully consumed.

I think it’s been a good spring with early warm temperatures, sufficient rain to keep nectar flowing, yet enough dry days to allow for long days of foraging.

Now if I could just keep up with planting the garden…