Thursday, June 14, 2012

The Buzzness

Well, it had been awhile since we had checked the hives.   The new hive we haven't really opened up and bothered them, especially since we usually only check the hives monthly, not weekly.  

The second hive was lacking an inner cover, so we had cheated a bit, just to get them through until we picked one up. 

So today, when we went out there armed with our inner cover to put on the hive, this is what it looked like....

All of that is brood and honey built in the top of the lid.  We put all of it in a bowl on top of the hive, to let the bees clean it up.

After we finished with the second hive, we moved to the first hive.  This hive had issues of its own, considering when I purchased and set up the Medium Super, the place I buy my beek supplies only had 5 frames in stock.  They needed the space, so I made the decision to go ahead and put the medium super and five frames on the two deep hive bodies, and hope that my supplier got more frames in soon.

Well, they didn't get their frames in fast enough, but they finally did. So we ran right over and picked those up.  This is what we faced when we opened the first hive....
Inside medium super....

Inner cover....
So we worked diligently on getting that all cleaned up, put in the five new frames and this is what we ended up with ....


That's my largest stock pot I own, fileld with comb and honey. We weighed it, and it weighed in at 17.4 lbs.  That's not counting the large burr comb (just like the one on top there) that was still covered in bees that I left in another bucket, so that the bees could get out or clean it up.

Now I've got to figure out how I'm going to crush and filter the honey, finish up my fry pies for tomorrow, and still walk 2 miles tonight.

Happy Thursday everyone!

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