Our bees are doing super-de-dooper and have earned their first honey super!

After last weekend’s inspection with 16 frames of bees, 6 new in one week I realized that we might not have much time until the bees needed more space. Honey supers are the next step, but our hand-me-downs from my grandfather and coworker needed some work, so Tuesday I headed up to Bowdinham to see Rick Cooper. The full hive body and supers we got from my grandfather was pronounced good to go (i.e. no sign of American Foul Brood or other bee diseases that would cause a whole colony to die if we used it). I got some new foundation for all the various hive parts as well. Back home we painted one of our honey supers to match the hive (gotta be color coordinated in our backyard!). We also sorted through all the medium frames and found 10 that were ready to go.

With a few friends over to join in the fun and sunny skies we were ready to go. I
was feeling more comfortable around bees and left the veils to Rob and the guests and contented myself to have a zoom camera lense and hover in the background.

We started off with a good douse of smoke. A combination of dry leaves, dry pine needles, and some green grass has finally been arrived at to create a nice steady smoke.

The goal of this quick inspection was simply to asses whether the bees were ready for a super. Because of this we only looked in the top box as the bottom box is presumed to be at least as full as last Sunday. At first the box seemed empty, but then one by one everyone had a turn to pull out a full frame of bees:

We saw more honey than brood in the top box overall. This frame is mostly honey:

We also saw some capped brood as well as some larvae. This is the same area we saw the queen in last week so clearly her offspring are progressing nicely.

For only being 5 days since we last looked, they sure did make a lot of progress. This frame was untouched on Sunday and here is what it looked like today(Friday):

We did not inspect the bottom box. As it was less than a week since the last time we opened them we didn’t feel diseases or bee health would be an issue – just space. So having determined they were certainly ready for an addition we added our first medium honey super. Here is our hive today – now a stack 3 high!

I’ll leave you with my favorite photo of the day. This is some burr comb and honey we scraped off. One of the workers just couldn’t let me get away with that on my hive tool and obligingly posed for a series of photos. This one is my favorite.