Queen Exile

I wanted to do one last thorough inspection before going out of town for the next few weekends. Thistle was looking pretty good, there was a lot of capped honey in the top super:

There were also a few crazy pieces, here is one where the bees had capped honey underneath, and another layer on top:

When I did Mint's inspection, they were not doing quite as well. When I started looking at the frames in the top super, there was a ton of brood! There should have been absolutely no brood because I was using a queen excluder - so that means that I accidentally trapped the queen in the top 25% of the hive that had mostly foundation without drawn comb on it. The bottom 75% was almost completely filled with honey, I saw a bit of what looked like drone brood, and there were a ton of drones wandering around the hive. Usually, when you trap the queen in the honey supers, the bees start to see her as weak because she is not producing enough brood - so they would either make a new queen, or a worker would start laying (worker bees can only lay drones). I only had the queen excluder on for 3 weeks, I didn't see any evidence that the bees had tried to replace the queen, so I just put the top box on in the middle and moved the bottom boxes filled with honey up to the top. Hopefully I didn't screw things up too badly...

Since both hives seemed to be pretty full - I put on another box, making the hives just about as tall as I was:

Hot Bees

I did a double check today to make sure that the bees were making it up through the queen excluders, I only took a quick peek, but there seems to be a lot of activity up there. I didn't want to do a full inspection because it has been so hot recently (90+ degrees) so instead I just gave the bees some extra water (in their bucket) and planted 3 sunflowers for them (right in front of the bench):

There has also been a lot of activity in front of the hives lately, the bees are probably just trying to spend a little bit more time on the porch to cool down: