The weekly hive inspection

Saturday was hive inspection day. You're meant to inspect them every 7 to 9 days over the swarm period (or "Summer" as I like to call it). Mainly you're looking for signs that they're going to swarm, specifically new queen cells being made at the bottom of the frames in the hive. What are frames? They're the removeabe wooden frames that the bees make their comb in. Before the advent of removeable frames back in 1851 to extact the honey meant killing all your bees.

So in todays inspection I opened up hive1. They've been busy drawing comb and storing honey in the super, the whole hive was pretty full of bees. In the brood box I couldn't see the queen at all -I've never actually seen a queen in this hive so far. But I'm pretty sure they have one because apart from all the stages of brood being present I could also see lots of eggs. Bee eggs look a bit like a really tiny grain of rice. See for yourself:

Bee eggs!

The eggs take about 3 days to hatch so seeing them in the hive means the queen was present at least three days ago. Whilst there's eggs in the hive if something happens to the queen (like a clumsy beekeeper drops a hive tool on her head or squashes her under a box or something) then the bees will make a new queen from one of these eggs. There was no sign that they're making a new queen so I'm happy with that.

As I mentioned in an earlier post bees get their protein from plants in the form of pollen. They're sort of vegetarians. I say sort of because if there's a problem with any larva or pupae the bees will pull them out and 'recycle' the protein. Anyway back to this pollen: They carry the pollen in pollen baskets, some long hairs on their back lower legs. Here's a rather blurred picture of a bee returning with full pollen baskets:

Bee with pollen

Once in the hive the pollen is stored in comb for use later. They use pollen to make bee bread. No, I didn't just make that up. They take some pollen and knead honey into it to make bee bread.

Stored pollen

When bees are out collecting pollen they only ever collect from one type of flower at a time and store each pollen type seperately. The different pollens from different plants vary in colour, and if you have nothing better to do you can get a pollen colour chart and work out what pollens your bees are bringing in. I won't be doing that, I'm sure the bees know what they're doing. People tend to assume bees pull most of their food from ground level flowers like bedding plants and so on but they also use trees. Living where I do there's plenty of mature trees for them to plunder.

Whilst in the hive I pulled out the last national size frame (the bees came on 5 of these originally) brushed the bees off it, removed the padding I'd put around it to make it up to commercial frame size and placed it in the super (the bit were the bees make their honey) and popped a new commercial frame in the brood box. So now all the frames in there are the right size at last. I haven't started swapping out the frames in hive2 yet may do that next year. It's a lot easier once all the bees are on the right size frames for the hive though.

I also had a look in hive2. The hive that I believe recently raised a new queen. I couldn't see a queen in there. Last week I moved a frame of brood and eggs from hive1 to hive2. If you move eggs into a queenless hive they start making a new queen pretty sharpish but they don't appear to have done this with the added frame so I think they do have a queen now but she hasn't started laying yet. Hope she gets a wriggle on. In Hive2 they've started drawing out the honeycomb in the super I added too. I'm still feeding this colony as they're needing to make lots of wax. It's generally accepted it takes 8 kilos of honey to make one kilo of wax so I figure I don't want to put them under too much strain whilst they're still getting established.