Jusssst kidding… it’s actually a very low key activity 🙂 Without confirming by looking at my records (they’re not at hand at the moment), I think I’ve been involved / preparing for the bees for ~2 months now. Here are a few photos taken last Saturday while I was checking on the herd, uh, colony.
This 1st pic was taken just after I’d removed the lid from the top Brood Super (box) and was beginning to loosen the frames. Since they build comb fairly quickly, you’ll soon have frames connected to one another – making removal for inspection a royal pain in the knickers – if you don’t and if you don’t loosen it at least once a week.
The 2nd pic shows a frame that’s been removed from the super. The whitish area / material is comb that’s been freshly created. (I always assumed honeycomb was honey-colored, because that’s how I’d always seen it… not true, as it gets darker over time and re-use by the bees. So, whitish honeycomb = relatively newly created; darker comb = older. This brings up an interesting question that I’m not qualified to answer: which is better tasting / more healthy for humans? Can’t say, don’t know, but my guess is the aged because some of the honey properties may have saturated it over time.)
The 3rd picture is, well, me doing the mock macho-guy beekeeper dance 🙂
Looking back on my experience with the colony / hive @ this point in time, I think I would have waited another month to add the 2nd super… as the colony has begun “building up” to the 2nd story already and, in the process, not fully populating the lower frames with brood. I don’t think this is an actual issue to the bees – they’ll build comb / queen will lay eggs wherever they find room – but waiting until they’d fully filled the lower frames would have made it more esthetically pleasing to me, the beekeeper 😉
That’s it for now, thanks for stopping by and write when you get work!
hal