Hive Inspections

At my beekeeper meeting, I met an experienced beekeeper, we'll call him Mr. Bees, who was gracious enough to come to inspect my hives with me to show me the ropes a bit.  Sadly, we didn't find any of my queens (a lesson that even the veterans can have trouble spotting her), but we did find evidence of the queen (eggs and larvae) in my big original hive and in the hive containing the swarm I caught.  That's good!  However, in the split I started there was no queen.  Super sad.  I had worked so hard to put queen cells in, but they kept booting the queens out.  I tried to acclimate a queen, and I thought they had accepted her, but either they booted her out as well or she died or never got mated or...

 (Thanks, William, for snapping this photo.  He enjoyed watching us through the broken shed window.)

Mr. Bees noted that all my bees looked healthy (minus the missing queen colony since they won't survive without a leading lady!) and that I'll have plenty of honey from the big hive to harvest before long.  But he also pointed out a crucial mistake I made with my split and swarm hive: I put two supers (boxes) on the hives when I should have started with only one.  By giving them extra space I slowed their growth and wasted precious frame space, because the bees will just move to the top to start building, bypassing all that nice frame space at the bottom of the hive.  He helped me with that by taking off the top super of my split colony and by suggesting I swap my supers on my swarm colony once the top fills up. Lastly, Mr. Bees took a frame of larvae out of my swarm hive to put into my queenless-split hive to give them a chance at turning one of those babies into a queen.

Today I went back to see if our attempt at giving my split a queen worked... it didn't.  I cracked open my big hive to steal a frame of young eggs and larvae in hopes that they'll turn one of those babies into their queen (again)... please, guys, please just accept a queen already.  The big hive was doing awesome.  I saw my queen for the first time!  Now that I've seen her in the hive, I know just what to look for.  She stood out from the crowd.  She was a beautiful lady.  When I put the hive back together I looked at all their frames of honey filling up and decided that we'd go ahead and harvest our first frame, because... yum.

The kids were thrilled to see me walk up to the house with a full frame of honey.  

They sunk their fingers deep into the dripping honey and licked with glee.

I haven't developed any snazzy harvesting techniques yet.  For this taste, I just scraped the wax and honey off the plastic foundation and poured it through a sieve.  Many of us also enjoyed chewing on the wax. (Don't mind the hairbrush hanging out in the background... was just trying to prepare a hair treatment...just kidding.)

The honey is so light in color with a bit of a floral taste in a whole lot of sweetness.  I love the bees even without their gift of honey... but this honey thing just made the whole thing that much more rewardingly sweet.