June in New England brought record high rainfall totals everywhere, and the few sunny hours have been on week days. I hived my bees in mid-May and have been unable to get in to check on them since. Activity levels tell me that they’ve been getting enough to eat – workers are visibly laden with pollen and my check list of flowering plants has been progressing nicely, from Labrador tea to raspberry through pea blossoms to lupine, even in the douwnpours. Today we reached a low of 38% cloud cover and I figured, to these bees, that’s sunlight. As soon as 10:30 a.m. rolled around the temperature had climbed into the low seventies. I donned full gear, figuring they would be testy, and fired up the smoker.
My primary tasks for today were to check for a laying queen (through the presence of eggs and larvae) and give them some additional living space (if necessary).I use medium supers because I’m not strong enough to move a full hive body weighing over 130 pounds.
As soon as I removed the hive top feeder I knew I was a little late to the game. You can see the extensive free comb the bees have worked in an effort to expand upsward. I took the feeders off both hives and added a medium super, propping the feeder on its back next to the hive entrance to encourage retrieval of the honey and pollen stores. This picture was taken a few minutes after I removed the feeder. The picture below is six hours later and the comb is fairly clean.
I run 9 frames in 10 frame equipment. It makes the comb a little deeper and the boxes a little lighter. It is interesting to note that the spacing of the free comb mirrors the frame spacing, even if it cants off in different angles after few inches.
These two hives are named “To Bee” and “Not to Bee”. “Not” is a nuc start hive and is still a little more populous than “To”. The bees in “Not” were completely unfazed by my invastion this morning – didn’t even come up to check me out. “To” was fairly agressive, coming up to the face veil and following me about 20′ from the hive after I was finished. Here’s a close-up of the free comb with bees still attending. It was actually fairly difficult to determine absolutely that the queen was not milling around there somewhere.
Tags: beekeeping, bees, weather