Found the Queen of Hive2

Another week another hive inspection. All seems to be going well in both. Lots of eggs and brood and they're still bringing in nectar and pollen. In the shallow supers comb is being drawn but they've started to store in them already. The National Deep I added as a super whilst I phased out the National deep frames in Hive1 seems to be full now so it'll be time to extract soon -built myself a honey extractor, I'll say a bit more about that in a later post when it's time to use it. This week I spotted the queen in Hive2, she's a fat little thing and quite camera shy so it's a bit blurred.

Queen on frame of honey

I've finished sterilising the crownboards from the auction, also treated the outside edges with Shed & Fence paint. One of them needed escape holes cuting into it and another needed one adding and one widening so I got to have a play with the power saw. I've also sterilised the supers and begun painting them green too -taking a few coats to cover the brick red they're already painted and really it's just an aesthetic thing anyway. Two had plastic runners and one had metal ones, I've removed them and will be replacing them when I need to use them -although I plan to use two as ekes for feeders so shan't be needing to do that for a while.To sterilise the nails that I pulled out with the runners I dropped them on a piece of wood and got the blowtorch to them till they were red hot, I'm fairly confident that'll do the trick. Haven't made a start on the frames yet so got them tied up in bin bags at the moment. I'll probably deal with them in the winter when they're less likely to draw attention from the bees. The frame scraper and caping fork I acquired were treated to and hour of being boiled in a soda crystal solution whilst I watched an episode of Dexter and drank a Latte (hard work this bee keeping malarky) and came out gleaming -I'm going to varnish the scraper's wooden handle at some point to make it easier to keep clean. Meanwhile for your delectation here's 30 seconds of bees flying in and out of the hives:

Exciting isnt it? :p The nearest is Hive1 which has a huge population, Hive2 is less populous but the entrance looks almost as busy.  It was an overcast day of drizzle so there was less bee activity than I see on sunnier days.

I've spotted a few undertaker bees carrying dead bees for disposal away from the hives. Watched one on Saturday leave the hive I was inspecting and fly around the garden in clockwise circles which got wider and wider till it left the garden. No idea what that was about but I'd guess it was looking for a site to drop it's dead sister. Last week I watched another undertaker despoit a dead bee in one of the wildlife ponds. There's probably something in there that'll eat it.