Spring Into Action

This article is going to have a lot of photographs. I had an assistant this time who helped me out and took photos.

It's really difficult to manage your own hive and take good photos.

The hive you see me working with here is a replacement of my previous winter hive that unfortunately died off. They've only been in this hive for about two weeks and already they have completely filled out the frames that were in the original box and began building their own artful rendition of comb in the empty box above them as you see in the second photo.

I had a hunch they would have started doing something like this, but I hadn't expected it to be so well built in only two weeks time. Bees constantly amaze me. Unfortunately for them, I needed the empty deep box above them so I could actually give them new frames to work with instead of building their own comb like this. Half of it came off on the side of the deep. Half of it stayed on the frames. I felt bad having to destroy so much of their work, but I kept the comb near by their hive so they could re-use the resources should they choose.

Here's a close up shot of the lower potion that stuck to the frames before I scraped it off with my hive tool.

In each 1st Deep box, I removed the 3rd and 6th frames and put them into the 2nd Deep. I replaced the removed frames with empty ones for them to build out and filled the rest of the 2nd Deep with empty frames. Taking out these two frames and putting them in a higher box entices the bees to move up into the 2nd Deep instead of potentially not realising there's a lot of new room in their attic to spread out.

This is the 2nd Deep box with the 3rd and 6th frames from the 1st Deep inside. The rest of this box will be filled out with empty frames on either side. Again, enticing them to build on the new "attic" frames rather than just the lower portions.

These next photos are of the second hive. Again, you can see they were also becoming quite artistic, but thankfully they didn't build any on the box itself, only on top of the frames. Again, I scraped it off and placed it on the ground so they could re-use the resources if they wanted to.

The process repeats again, taking a couple of the frames and putting them up in the 2nd Deep then filling that top box out with new frames.

After filling out the top Deep, I placed a queen excluder. You can see that here. The queen is much larger than her worker bees, thankfully this grate will make it so the worker bees can store nectar in the top Super box (honey storage), but the queen cannot pollute the honey storage with larvae. She has two whole deep boxes to work with.

All Done!!! I now have two deep boxes full of frames for them to work with this spring and a top Super for honey storage at some point!

#springprep #newhivebegininspring