Some more pictures of the addition and the progress in there. It is harder to see in this one. Katie wishes that Jim had built this with a window in it so that she could see what is going on every day.
You can see them crossing the comb from one frame to the other. I have to do something about that but not quite sure how to do that yet.
It looks like they have these bars all filled up with honey.
Pretty unbelievable that they have done this much since I got them.
The hive is getting closer to being full of comb now.
Jim is demonstrating the process that we have come up with to expand the hive. If the queen ends up laying eggs in the added super we may try to split the hive.
I don't even get this kind of pressure at work.
The completed addition.
We thought that the bees were getting ready to swarm because they started hanging (literally) out on the outside of the hive.
Turns out that they just do this in the summer when it gets too hot inside the hive. Some of them hang on the side of the hive to help keep the inside of the hive cooler.
It didn't take them long at all to fill up the rest of the hive with comb. You can see where they made the combs on the right side of the hive much bigger. That is where I spaced the top bars apart so that the bees would have room to go into the super that we put on top of the hive.
Looking through the top cover of the super on top of the hive.
Got stung for the first time a couple of days ago. It had been really hot (around 90 or better) so I had propped the top cover of the super up a little bit thinking that it would let a some of the hot air flow out of the hive. When I went to check on the hive and see what was going on in the super as soon as I lifted the top cover one came out and got me in the hand. Looking back I bet that they were guarding it like it was another entrance to the hive. However, the next time I went to peek in there I did use my smoker and had gloves on just in case. No problems since I stopped propping the cover up though. The next hot spell we had I just left them alone and everything was fine.
One of our bees on the clover in our yard. I found that having bees is a great excuse to mow your lawn less. The clover in the yard becomes food for the bees and an excuse to not mow the lawn.
For awhile the bees would come to the pool and drink from the drops of water on Katie.
The bees don't even mind if you have a hot dog fire near 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.
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.
