As you can see in the above photo, we had special guests observing the week five inspection. My daughter Aluna (left), her daughter Taylor (middle). both from Las Vegas, and daughter Sheba watched from the safety of a first floor window as Monta and I inspected our two hives. Just one advantage of having our hives near the house.
The weather was fine today with temperatures in the 80s, and full sunshine. Quite a contrast to the last week of weather. It's been rainy much of the week, thunderstorms now and then, and the temperature fell into 40s twice this week.
I opened up Bee Glad..., the Langstroth first. I had put a second deep on this hive last week but the weather seemed to have discouraged much expansion. The only frame with comb drawn in this box was one I moved up from the bottom one after last week's inspection.
The bottom box had plenty of bees with all frames close to drawn. We observed some drones chewing out of their cells. The middle most frames contained capped worker cells, larvae, and I got a great view of eggs. I could not observe the queen but evidence shows she's there. I had a bit of a problem with cross comb between the middle frames. I cut some, pushed some comb a bit without leaving any comb failure in my wake.
This week, Monta asked to remove a frame from Bee Glad... (She's hooked) So I handed her the hive tool, took the camera and recorded the event. She said it was a real rush! See photo below.
Metpropolis, the Kenyan Top Bar Hive, is thriving as well. I progressed in moving the three hopelessly cross combed bars one step closer to the left fringe of the hive by judiciously moving some drawn, uncapped honey comb to the other end of the hive, and adding two new bars between pairs of straightly drawn comb.
Other then the cross-comb problem, the hive is doing well with plenty of larvae, capped brood, storage of pollen and honey.
I am very happy to report, in this my fifth inspection, that neither Monta nor I were stung.
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