First Spring Inspection

The weather has been getting up to 70 degrees during the day, so time to do the first spring inspection! There has been a lot of activity in front of the hive, so I was very excited to take a peek inside.

At a first glance, it looks like the bees have been doing a bit of spring cleaning. There was a lot of moldy/dusty looking pollen being thown out in front of the hive.

The hive still has 5 boxes on it, so I'll talk about them in the order that I took them apart. 5 will be the upper most box, 1 will be the lowest box.

Box 5 was about half filled with bees, there was mostly uncapped honey, but a little bit of capped honey.

Box 4 was similarly mostly uncapped honey, but there were eggs and larvae towards the bottom of some of the frames. So the queen may be hanging out up at the top to try to find space to lay eggs. I had left the queen excluder off of the hive for the winter so the bees could move freely wherever they wanted in order to keep warm and find food.

In between Box 4 and Box 3 there was a lot of burr comb containing larvae, unfortunately I had to break it open to move the boxes... sorry bees!

There was also one suspicious looking cell at the bottom of Box 4, it looked a bit like a queen cup since the opening was pointing downward instead of outward. The bees will build a lot of cells like this when they are preparing to swarm (leave the hive), so I decided to keep checking downward to make sure there weren't a lot of these:

 
Box 3 had a lot  of capped brood spotted with eggs, pollen and larvae. Looks like the queen doesn't have a whole lot of space to continue laying eggs. Here's a frame that has capped brood, pollen, and then honey towards the outside:

I also saw a lot of drones while peaking around, there's one walking around in the middle of the above picture. 

Box 2 was in a similar state to Box 3, lots of capped brood spotted with eggs, pollen and larvae. Down as far as box 2 it looked like there was really not a whole lot of space for the queen to lay new eggs. Each cell was already filled with something.

I was really curious to see what was in Box 1 since I had tried something odd last season. Last spring, the Thistle bees were spread out on the front of the hive a lot. One of the members of my bee guild had suggested adding an empty super on the bottom of the hive (instead of the top) so that the foraging bees had more space to land. It didn't really work as far as keeping the bees inside the hive more, and now that I've taken a look inside after winter, I'll definitely never do that again. Box 1 was mostly undrawn, and what was drawn was blackened or dusty like the bees hadn't been cleaning if very well.

I reorganized Box 2 and Box 1, putting half of the capped brood from Box 2 into Box 1. In both boxes, I put the brood into the center of the box, then filled the outsides with extracted honey frames. I took all of the undrawn comb out of Box 1 and I'm just storing it now. Hopefully this will coax the queen back down to the lower boxes to lay more eggs.

All in all, there was nothing too crazy going on inside, so it looks like the bees are doing good so far :)

In addition to peaking inside the hive, I did a little bit of cleaning on the outside. The copper roof had become pretty brown over the course of the winter, so I decided to clean it with some salt and lemons. Here's what it looked like before:

And here are the results, WOW!

Granulated Honey

Well, I'm very glad that I didn't bottle that January honey - it granulated in the bucket. Here is what it looks like now, the little marks are where I tried to poke it with my finger and then later went at it unsuccessfully with a spatula:

I also have a few bottles of honey left, here is a picture that I took of the July vs. August honey today:

The August honey is now a creamy color and as solid as a rock (like the honey in the bucket)! Not to worry though, honey doesn't go bad, so this is still very tasty. In order to get it out of the little plastic bottle, you'll have to soak it in a bowl of hot water for a few hours - not too hot though, you should be able to hold your hand in the bowl without burning yourself. If the water is too hot you'll melt the plastic. DON'T MICROWAVE THOSE PLASTIC BOTTLES! You'll definitely melt the bottle. Once you've soaked the bottle, the honey should be soft enough to spoon out into a wide mouthed glass jar where you can store it and microwave it later. The honey is still very tasty in coffee, tea, and baked goods. You can eat it plain, but I much prefer the smooth texture to the granulated one.