Second Inspection

Today I did a more thorough inspection of the hive. Last time I was just so happy to have seen the queen that I missed two frames. I was a little more calm for this inspection, so I only wore latex gloves (to keep the propolis off of my hands) instead of leather gloves.

Since I have two deeps now, the inspection is a little harder (just because the hive is bigger). Brandon took the top deep off, and I started my inspection in the bottom deep. Usually you don't get to see the queen, so during an inspection you are supposed to look for evidence that the queen is there. This was actually pretty neat - I picked up a frame, and there were uncapped cells with big fat larvae in them. The next frame I picked up had little tiny larvae, the next had eggs, and the next had the queen. So the age of the bees decreases as you get nearer to the queen. Seeing eggs is a very good sign because then you know the queen is doing her job, and she has been in the hive within the last few days. Here is a picture of Queenie, since I did find her again (she has the white dot on her):

There wasn't much to inspect in the top deep, as the bees hadn't even drawn much comb on the one new frame I put in last week. Here is the progress they had made on the one empty frame in the bottom deep (you can sort of see the beginning of some comb in the upper right corner, the rest of the frame is relatively flat):

Since the brood is still mainly in the bottom deep, I started their Apiguard treatment on the bottom box:

During this inspection I put each leg of the elevated hive stand in a bucket of water to protect against ants, the cinnamon did nothing for me. A few ants are fine, but there was a steady stream of ants climbing up to the feeder (that holds a bunch of sugar water). If there are too many ants, the colony will leave the hive.

I also took some pictures of a few strange things that I noticed last time. This is the supersedure cell (the little nub of comb towards the bottom of the image).

Here is the other odd thing that I found, for some reason the bees are building the honey comb extra thick, I have no idea why they decided to do that (maybe they wanted more space, I only just added their second deep. The bulge of comb in the upper left portion of the frame is what I am talking about, it should be flat like the rest of the frame).

I'll have to email Cheryl at Bear Foot Honey those pictures to see what she thinks I should do (I think it is great that Bear Foot Honey offers support to people that they sell hives to - I'm not sure what I would do without them).

Lastly, Brandon was playing with his new toy (iPad 2) while he was waiting for me to finish beekeeping, so he drew this picture of me and the bees: