Sunday June 5
We missed a step here on the bee blog when we checked on the bees last Sunday. Unfortunately the camera battery was out of juice so this is a photo-less update.

This was the first inspection with two deeps supers on, which certainly adds a bit of complexity. We inspected the top box first and found good progress. We had 6 frames of bees including eggs and a queen sighting on the middle frame. The outer most two frames were untouched. We were suprised to see 6 new frames of bees after only about a week with the new super, but it sure was exciting. After replacing the frames in the top super we put the whole top body onto our handy-dandy plastic box. I was a bit concerned the queen would just walk out of the bottom, but (as you’ll see in our next inspection report) there was no reason to suspect she did. I guess I wouldn’t want to be alone in a large green world instead of being in my home if I was a queen.

The bottom super was doing equally well. The middle frames were filled with capped brood with quite a few drone cells. Once again we wondered if a few of the larger drone cells were actually queen cells, but with 4 frames of blank space and what appears to be a strong hive we didn’t see any reason the bees would want to replace the queen.

The bottom super also contained some excitement – capped honey! the outermost frames on each side were half-filled with capped honey, about 4in of white wax. We got our first taste of our own honey when we removed a small bit of burr comb from the bottom and got just a taste of what seems to be the most delicious honey ever. I guess even in honey homegrown is better! 🙂