Taking Care of Some Beesness

We have been learning about how to run an apiary and earlier this week we decided to check on how our honey bees are doing.  We have 4 hives right now.  Two are colonies we purchased in 2011 and two are new swarms from last year.  Last year, our colonies began to swarm in March and continued to do so through the summer, so we were afraid they may have been getting ready to do that again.  This time, however, the plan was to head off the swarms by dividing the colony that seemed to be the most active and possibly ready to swarm.

Here are Lisa and Matthew suited up and checking them out.  They are looking at the hive that we thought may be ready to divide.

This was the scene between the super and the top hive body box.

These frames show that some of the brood has been capped, but we were expecting the frames to be completely full and capped.  If they are all like these, then this hive is not ready to divide.



Pulling out a couple more frames.

Here is Lisa examining it.

These are not as full as the first frames checked.  We will check on that hive again in a few weeks to see if they get everything filled up.

They also checked on the other hive that has been most active, which was a new swarm from last year.  They looked good.  The bottom frames are getting filled up nicely. 

All the hives seem to be doing ok, even though none are ready to divide yet.  We had a very cold March, over all, this year and it seems that true Spring weather was slow getting here.  I've noticed that everything is blooming later this year, so I guess the bees are just rounding out everything later as well.  Maybe last year everything was just earlier? 

Thankfully no one was stung very badly during this expedition.  Lisa actually did some bee work all by herself a couple days earlier with no protection except the veil and did not get stung at all.  When these pictures were taken, last Wednesday, the only sting we had was a friend who was visiting.  I was up there very near the bees taking pictures and he was up there also, observing.  Neither of us were wearing any bee protection and he unfortunately got stung on the ear.  Thankfully it didn't swell much and he discovered that he is not allergic to honey bee stings!