The Year's First Hive Inspection

Yesterday, Ruth and I did our first hive inspection of the year.  Beautiful afternoon, sunny, breezy, a great day to get into the hives.  We’ve seen a lot of activity, lots of bees flying in and out, lots of pollen going in for the past two weeks, but we’re still pretty new at this, still not much experience, and we didn’t know what we were going to find once we got in there.

Bees go through a lot of stores in the winter, and though we had left them everything they made last year, there was still the fear that they might be running low on honey.  It wouldn’t have surprised us at all to find lots of empty frames inside the hive.

Imagine our surprise to find the boxes nearly full of honey!  Apparently, the bees had had plenty to eat, and were already starting to pack it away again.  Lots of honey, a fair amount of nectar, and best of all, lots of fresh brood in a very good pattern.  That means the queen in each hive is thriving, already hard at work laying eggs and making new bees.  It was very reassuring to see the colonies booming.

Though we hadn’t expected to, we wound up taking some of the honey from the hives.  We’re trying to go foundationless, meaning that instead of a sheet of plastic in each frame upon which the bees build their comb, we have an empty frame with a comb guide at the top to encourage the bees to build straight comb within the frame.  Unfortunately, the bees didn’t have a ruler inside the hive, and some of their comb ranged over two or three frames.  We carefully cut the errant comb loose, arranged it to fit within a single frame, and used rubber bands to hold it in place until the bees can reattach it.  In some cases, the comb was so wonky (the technical term) that we wound up just cutting it off and tossing it in a bucket along with the burr comb.  We had enough by the end that we will have to work a bit to extract it, and we’ll wind up with several pounds of fresh honey. 

All in all, it was a very satisfying day.  The bees look great, and we seem well on our way to a successful bee season.  We’re already looking forward to swarm season, catching more bees, and growing our nascent apiary.  And we can’t wait until we can make our lip balms and lotion bars with beeswax from our own hives.

Stay tuned.