Eve of my spring break- smoker lit and hive ready
Lid off, and a smaller amount of bees on top. Used little smoke. Started by removing frames closest to the camera and stored on frame/bench.
Silly girls- drawing comb sideways between frames. Kinda pretty thought! PS- love my J-Hook bar in the background.
Good to see brood, larvae, and nectar. 1st frame with brood, but both sides of the next 3-4 frames have various amounts of brood. Those of you with good eyes can see the queen on this frame. I missed it in real life- just saw her in pictures!
Like this- you can zoom in and examine larvae and see the worker bee topping off the soon to be pupa in the brood.
An example of a full brood frame. I think the unusual laying (nectar/pollen cells) is just because it is spring time. Note the empty drone cells upper right.
Finally found the queen. The Same picture-left is what it looks like, right zoomed in.
Like this picture of her too. She is crawling to hide. Looks really good. So very glad to win her in a raffle at the Silt CO bee conference last June!
I put what was the top deep on the bottom. The (now top) empty deep is full of drawn comb with little or no pollen, nectar. The Top Bar BOOT shaped frame from last summer was still in here, but completely empty. I replaced it with a full drawn frame from the basement.
Seems like last fall I discovered a few frames with damage like this. At that time I think I squished any moths/larvae that were eating this...curious what it might have been.
By the way, I did one Formic acid treatment 2 weeks ago. Will try to post. Seems like I'd better watch for signs of a swarm and should consider a split in about 3-4 weeks. Also, do a mite count and determine if I'll do a 3-week formic acid treatment.
Enough for now
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