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.

Annabell is alive!

We checked on the hive today to make sure that none of the comb fell with the heat. Just as we opened the window we saw Annabell crawling around the end of one of the combs. So, we know that she is alive. For those of you who don't know Katie named the queen Annabell. Here are a couple of pictures of the progress on the comb.

Building Comb

The Bees are busy building comb now. It has been pretty wet here lately but I am surprised how much the bees are flying in the rain. I thought that I had read somewhere that they don't go out in the rain but that doesn't seem to be true either. Maybe they just don't go out in heavy rain. Katie stuck here hand in the hive and got a couple of pictures from the back of the hive facing the entrance. Looks like the bees have the first 7 or 8 combs about 75% of the way across the top bars.

Back on track

The bees left the back wall of the hive and returned to building comb from the top bars. I still don't know if the queen is in there, but there was a lot of activity today. I took the cork out of the second hive entrance today because there were so many bees coming and going today.

Removing the fallen comb

So what I had read about moving fallen comb to the back end of the hive turned out not to work in my case. Apparently everything you read on the internet isn't true.I watched for a couple of days but my bees just attached the fallen comb to the bottom of the hive and then started to fill the comb with pollen. Also, the queen seemed to be spending all of her time on this fallen comb. We decided we had to remove it so that the bees returned to building comb from the top bars. I opened the hive up and used the spatula again to carefully scrape the comb from the bottom of the hive and remove it. I am worried that there is still a bunch of bees hanging on the back wall of the hive instead of being with the rest of the bees near the hive entrance. We did not see the queen after removing the comb, but I am hoping that she moved over to the main bunch of bees and is in there somewhere.