Well, we’ve been a bit BEE-hind in updating everyone on the progress of the bees. One of the nice things about beekeeping as a hobby is that it allows you plenty of flexibility in when you do your hive inspections, so if you, say, go off to Washington state for a week you can feel good knowing the bees are working hard until you get back.
On Aug 24 we did an inspection soon after we returned from our trip. In bee-world the end of August is prime season as the goldenrod blooms and we’ve seen the bees going like crazy over the past few weeks.
Overall we found the bees in good health with a lot more bees than after the swarm earlier in the summer. The colony seems to have regained full strength. The honey stores were doing pretty well and the 2 drawn comb frames of the shallow honey super we had added were being filled with honey. A lot of the upper level was also filled with honey like this frame:
Once again we saw the elusive (and often out-of-focus) queen, happily laying:
It was at this inspection that we decided to make the interesting move of putting the second honey super in the middle between the two deep supers. We did this for a couple reasons. First, the hive seemed really full, and we didnt’ want to risk another swarm again, second, we had heard that the goldenrod flow can be big and we thought we might be able to entice the bees into making more honey if they had the space.
Before we could do any more inspections or think about harvesting honey, Tropical Storm Irene reared her ugly head. With the forecast for Irene to make landfall in Long Island and track up through central New England, the threat of Tropical Storm force winds on the coast of Maine was there. While we did take a few minutes to fill some water, put away the grill, and find our flashlights, the big worry was the bees! I asked Rob to make sure the hive was in top shape – returning our signature “really big rock” to the top of the hive, and doing a quick tie down of the supers. I have no idea what it would take to flip the hive over, but with 2 honey supers on I figured it was sorta high-profile, and more to the point the bees would die if they flipped sideways in 40mph winds and rain. Well Rob did an incredible job, once again proving that “anything worth doing is worth over-doing”. Here is our hive with a tri-point tie down to 18in rebar sunk almost a foot into the grass:
You’ll notice the tied-down hive has the honey super in between the two deep frames still. We went out and removed the super and replaced it onto the top level exactly one week after we put it there – Aug 31. So the bees had some extra space for Irene, which moved through on the 28th. When we removed it we found, the bees had done an excellent job of cleaning out the second old super that had lived in my grandparents barn for many years, but they didn’t seem to have been motivated to store any honey in it. I was a bit disappointing to see my goldenrod flow hadn’t materialized, but at least the super got cleaned for next year. I didn’t want to leave it in the middle any longer as I didn’t want the queen laying in it, because then we’d need to leave the super on longer.
Luckily Irene didn’t do anything to the hive. We were lucky and only lost power for a few hours, rather than days like a couple of my coworkers. I’ll leave you with a photo Rob took during the beginning of the storm of South Freeport Harbor near our house. This far interior point of Casco Bay is usually closer to glass than whitecaps!
Next up, the honey harvest!!!!