The Hive Report

Well, since the hives swarmed i've been wanting to see how things were doing. Got into them this afternoon, and here's the picture from the top super. Without disturbing the (i hope) new queen, no way to tell whether she's there, and laying, and fertile. Will know more in a couple weeks when we hope to see a surge of new foragers and new workers in the hive.

Meanwhile, here's the bee log.

78 deg and sunny, light wind. Looked in all the hives
beginning with MQ.

MQ: now is working 5 frame surfaces. There are lots of
capped brood, about 50% coverage of 3 frame surfaces.
There is some honey, perhaps an equal amount of capped
honey. They are not draining the sugar water
very fast. There is fresh larvae.

Package hive: hasn't progressed very much since last
inspection. The swarming seems to have slowed them down.
The upper super box still has frames with drawn comb,
but not much honey. I.e., they're about at the same honey
fill state as on 6/1. Could be they swarmed right after
that inspection. Workforce much reduced from
pre-swarm, as judged from number of bees on upper frames.
Only 5-10% the number of bees working the supers.

Swarm hive: top two supers look like they're getting filled
with honey, but a lot of it is uncapped as yet. Definitely
ahead of the package hive, though with a lot more honey actually
in the frames. Could be that this hive swarmed a week or more
after the pkg hive, which would account for why they have so
much more honey up there. Workforce much reduced from
pre-swarm, as judged from number of bees on upper frames.
Only 5-10% the number of bees working the supers.

MQ top view. Two and a half frames being worked.

MQ one of the inner frames. Lots of brood. This is a super sized frame in a hive body sized box, hence the descending cells.

Much reduced workforce for package hive. Not much progress in last two weeks, if any.

Swarm hive capping honey. About the same state in the two top supers judging from this view.

Swarm hive shows some capped honey, a lot of uncapped cells.

Need to go back through log, figure out when the swarms probably occurred, and predict when new resources should be appearing. If either of the hives appears not to be laying, then the MQ hive can be merged in to provide a queen. That one seems to be going pretty well.