Hive seems in good shape

Karl opened the hive up this morning for the first time in over a month. Before we left for vacation at the end of July, we were concerned that the girls were working on a new queen and may be unhappy and ready to swarm. Karl was eager to check the hive since we've gotten back a couple weeks ago, but waited a bit until he had a chance to order some bee supplies -- small-hive-beetle traps and some post-honey harvesting pesticides to kill off mites or beetles.

The best news of all is that they definitely have a queen and she is making tons of babies! Karl didn't see her, but he also didn't dig around for her. He simply wanted to make sure there wasn't an infestation of anything, check for bee larva (aka, make sure we had a healthy queen), see where they were in terms of honey for the winter - and get out.

More good news: there's plenty of honey. Here's a picture of a honey filled, capped frame.



When he was done looking around and was ready to close up the hive, Karl also put several small hive beetle traps in the hive. These plastic vegetable oil filled traps simply lay between the frames and have spaces too small for bees to get through, but just right for beetles. The beetles are constantly under attack in the hive and so they look for places to hide. The idea is the bees chase them through the small holes and they then fall into the oil and die.

The bad news is that Karl found two strange larvae in the hive. They were little grubs about as long as a quarter -- disgusting. Karl saw the first one and squished it with his finger but then immediately regretted it when the bees gathered around the squished larvae to carry it out of the hive. Karl later found another one on the baseboard of the hive, and the bees were not being nice to it, either. He didn't squish this one right away because he wanted a picture of it to use to identify it later. Even when he removed it from the hive and placed it on the windowsill, the bees followed it over there, gathered around and continued to sting and bite at it. Pretty amazing.


Now we'll get ready for cold weather and winter. Karl thinks we have enough honey to pull off some more frames for spinning. Once we clear the bees from those supers, we can take that honey off and put beetle and mite poison into the hive for pest control.