Progress

I am down to 7 empty bars now. They just started a comb on the 8th one.

Lots of Bees flying around the hive

So today there were a LOT of bees flying outside of the hive. There were several scenarios going through my head. I thought that they might be getting ready to swarm (even though they are still new and have plenty of room to grow). Then I thought that maybe a mouse had gotten in there or maybe the queen had died and they were getting worked up about that. This was all going on around 5:30 in the evening and Kayla mentioned that maybe they all got out of work at 5:00 too. It went on for about 15 minutes and then it all calmed back down to normal. Katie saw the same thing a week or two ago. I don't know what it was all about.

First hive inspection

Today we decided to open the hive up and take some of the combs out to inspect them. We found Annabell (she is the one with the white dot on her back) on the third comb from the end (the newest combs). Everything went good until we got to the older end of the hive. I think it was bar number six (where I originally hung the queen cage when we installed them) where the combs started being messed up. The combs curved from one top bar and connected on the end to the next top bar over. I am not sure how I should fix them so I just closed the hive back up and will think about it for awhile.

On another note,  I thought that I would buy gloves from Harbor Freight tools because they were only $6.00. You might notice in some of the pictures that I already had to duct tape them together where they are pulling apart. I don't know if I will buy any new ones though. The bees didn't even seem to care that I was fiddling around with the hive.

Click on some of the pictures to make them full size and you can see the baby bees that look like little white grubs in the bottom of the cells. I think that we are going to have a lot of new bees in the next couple of weeks.