I don't want to be an "over-sharer" and I suspect that in one area in particular, I'm becoming one. In order to remedy that, maybe I'll put some effort into documenting beekeeping things here rather than on facebook, where people are expecting cute pictures of my kids.
So, even though I did already over-share this on facebook and probably no one felt like reading it (ok, I can think of two people who are excited about dorky bee stuff...), I'm going to go ahead and repost it here.
Maybe I can have a cool bee blog someday. At the very least, I'll
be able to remember what I did and when, if I write about it...
Anyway, on to today's bee project.
Originally, the old comb was rubber banded into some empty frames when the bees were first moved from the old birdhouse into the hive box.
We didn't touch anything for about 6 weeks or so, and when we finally did we found that the new comb had been built kinda crooked. The frames toward either end were pretty good, but the middle ones were not. The comb jumped from one frame to the next, making it so that I couldn't pull them out to inspect them.
I spent a great deal of time stressing out about whether to just leave it alone (the bees don't care if it's crooked and I can't look at them) or to go in and try to remedy the situation.
On the advice of a beekeeper I spoke with, I decided I would go ahead and start working on it. This is my first hive, and I want to learn from it. I feel like I can't learn as much if I can't really see anything.
This is one of the frames that I pulled out from the hive. You can see where the comb was cut from the adjoining frame. You can also see on the left that this frame is full of capped brood. As much as I want to have nice, neat frames, I wasn't willing to dispose of so many baby bees.
So, I placed this frame with the capped brood into a second deep hive box placed on top of the original, thinking that the nurse bees would continue to take care of the babies until they were ready.
This was one of the frames that they did a beautiful job on! Straight and completely full of capped honey. This I left in there for the bees to use.
Crazy comb toward the back of the box. Half of it was nice, the other half, you can see, was crooked and attached to the back of the box. I tried just pushing it back into place, but it didn't work very well so I removed the whole frame.
This was the nice side of that frame! Beautiful, light-colored honey.
There was one small piece of comb that was removed that still had a bit of brood in it. This shows capped brood and larvae in several different sizes. The ones toward the bottom are much smaller than the ones in the middle. There are even some eggs (I think?) visible on the bottom right.
At the end of the day, I had one frame full of brood in the upper box that I would deal with later. That was replaced with a new frame with wax foundation. I also removed empty comb from two other frames and just replaced them with wax foundation in the lower box.
After one week, I went back in to check and see how much of the brood had emerged from that frame in the upper box. There was still a significant amount of capped brood, but no new brood or eggs. I decided to wait another week.
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