When Hive Inspections Go Bad

Wow.  Today was a stressful hive inspection!

First, it is about 91 degrees outside, so that made wearing long sleeves, long pants, bee hat and gloves HOT.

Second, the bees had yet to even start drawing out comb on the super that I put on a week ago.  Granted that I did put a queen excluder between the second and third super, but I figured there would at least be a few curious bees working away.  Nope ... nothing.

Third, have you ever dropped a box of bees? Yeeeeeaaaahhhh.  I had removed the third super and was in the process of taking off the second super so I could check the main brood box.  The second super weighed at least sixty pounds (and I was all, "No way will my supers get that heavy!").  I was placing the second super on top of the third super (which I had placed in the grass beside the hive) and must have misjudged my placement because as soon as I let go the box began to tip.  As I did NOT want eight frames of brood and honey to smash into the lawn, I quickly righted to box and undoubtedly crushed several bees in the process.  I suppose I didn't "technically" drop the box, but wow were the bees angry!

Finally, I had to move the main brood super to modify my hive stand  That, apparently, was the last straw.  There were about 200 bees angrily buzzing around me telling me exactly what they thought of my hive inspection skills.  Each time a huge bead of sweat rolled down my face I thought, "Oh God they've gotten in my bee hat!!!"

Between silent freak outs about possible bees in my hat, trying to avoid crushing any bees that may have fallen onto the lawn, moving some cinder blocks and being super hot today's inspection was stressful.

However, I remained calm, got done what I needed to do, and did not get stung, so I still view today's inspection as successful.  Plus, when moving the brood super, I noticed a few beetles along the bottom board being mercilessly attacked by the bees.  This is a good sign because it indicates my colony is strong enough to fend off pests.  I still have the hive beetle traps in place, but really haven't noticed much in them which means the bees are killing the beetles before they get a chance to get too far up in the hive.

I have been reading some reports on nectar flow failure, but it appears that my hive is still going fairly strong.  They've got honey stored around the brood and at least two frames full of nothing but honey.  Now if I could only get them to start storing in the third super ...

The Beetles - and I don't mean Paul, John, or Ringo

Hive beetles.  Tiny, annoying, indestructible hive beetles.  Today during my routine hive inspection I found three of them along the bottom board.  I was able to smash two and flick one into oblivion (I hope).

rAWr!

Being that my colony is still small (this Sunday marks three weeks since I installed them) I went ahead and placed an order for a product called Beetle Jail.  The Beetle Jail installs on the top bar of the hive frame, and I picked this type of trap because it seemed to be the easiest for me to handle while working the hive alone.  If you research traps on the internet, you'll find that there is some heated debate over the Beetle Jail trap versus the AJ Beetle Eater trap.  Both are top bar traps, but the AJ Beetle Eater requires more vegetable oil (the beetles fall into it and drown) and some reports said it was messy and harder to manipulate.  On the other hand, the most frequent con to the Beetle Jail trap that I saw was that the bees sometimes fill its openings with propolis.  This should be fairly easy to remedy with a quick cleaning during regular hive checks.  I'm hoping that since I caught the beetles relatively early, they won't be much of a problem. I want to keep my hive as "organic" as possible so non-chemical problem solvers are my preferred choice.

Additionally, I ordered a constructed hive top feeder with floats today.  The girls seem to LOVE inside feeding, so this new piece will make it easier for me to refill their feed without really disturbing them.

Much to my chagrin, the weather will be cold again over the next few days, however, I was at least able to refill their current feeder.

Beyond that, the bees were still working to draw out the outer brood frames with wax, the inner capped brood seemed to be progressing normally, and the workers have been storing pollen like mad.  I also noted a few cells on the outer frames now have eggs in them, so that is very promising.

The eggs are the "rice grain" items that appear in the bottom of the cell.