Our purpose for opening the hives today was to make sure that the queen we placed in the Nasty Hive last week successfully emerged from her cage and accepted by the colony. Sure enough when we opened it we noticed a remarkable difference in the comb that was built during the week. We found it to be more advanced and uniform than before. Last week the comb tended to be off to one side of the hive and this week we noticed the honeybees were working more frames.
We pulled out a few frames and Jim being better at this than me, was looking for egg laying. We noticed that the brood was evenly distributed and once we sure that we didn't have any laying workers, we were put at ease a bit and proceeded to find the queen. That was the last stressful thing we needed to make sure happened. Sure enough, Jim found her AGAIN! Jim - 15, Frank - 0
Satisfied we closed the Nasty Hive and off we went to check on Hive C. All was well there. A bit messy with the slow building comb but we feel that the frames weren't spaced properly so that's why the comb wasn't even. Brood existed and we closed her up.
Onto Alpha Hive. The hive was very busy and perfect in every sense. We quickly removed the top honey super and found that there were 3 beautifully capped frames which we took and replaced with 3 empty frames. All in all, everything was going well so that's all to report on the honeybee hives.
We harvested the honey and bottled about 17 honey containers this weekend. This batch was much darker and extremely thicker than the first batch which was lighter and with regular thickness. We're hoping for another prosperous honey harvest with the next nectar flow which will occur sometime later this month and into next month.
Here's a picture of the honey harvest:
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