Thursday 20 May Unexpectantly being home at lunchtime today (a water main break on the street where the elementary school is, forced a cancellation of school mid-morning, so I am home with Colin) I was able to spend some time with the bees at lunch. The single deep has well developed comb on 6.5 of the 10 frames. The hive entrance faces due south and the 3 eastern most frames have bees on them, but little comb development at the moment. It's a beautiful sunny day with nary a cloud in the sky and a temperature of almost 75 degrees by 12:30 - the girls are very active today flying in and out of the hive. I decided that being away this weekend for the annual (35th this year) GEOGE golf tournament, I should consider adding another deep super rather than risk the thought of swarming while I am gone. So after an initial inspection of the hive, I have added a second deep to the top of the hive. Lots of room for expansion. The bees seemed to be in a good mood today - no one seemed really concerned that I was in there. My smoker once again didn't stay lit, so it's a good thing the girls seemed calm and collected. I pulled and looked over 5 frames - never did see the queen, although I saw lots of larvae and lots of eggs. I grabbed some photos as I went along, and in reviewing those photos, I found the queen! I need to be more observant! She's about in the middle of this picture with the blue dot.
I think the comb looks great. I can find lots of eggs, and lots of developed larvae, capped cells, and pollen cells. A very interesting couple of things happened as I was putting the top frame feeder back on top of the now double high deeps ... first I saw 2 bees obviously battling each other, finally ending up with one fly away with the other in it's grasp ... could this have been robbing going on? I did have the feeder with sugar syrup exposed to the air for quite a lengthy period of time ... perhaps 10 min? The other thing was when I placed the feeder back on top of the supers, with a min or so, the sound coming from the feeder area increased in volume and pitch ... very noticeably. As I bent my ear closer to the area, and gazed in for a look, I couldn't believe what I was seeing ... the bees seemed to be just standing in place(s) and slowly beating their wings - as if they were trying to cool the area down. I took my little digital camera and attempted to capture some of what I was looking at - hopefully you can see it here . The comb you see here in the feeder is brace comb I scraped from the inner cover.
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