Day 35/36 Inspections

They have started putting honey in the flow hives!

It seems that our ladies – (both sets!) – have finally figured out how the flow hive frames work, and they have put the wax comb in along the edges where it needs to be. They are packing the honey away in the flow hives…. and we are thrilled.

They are also packing it away in the other supers as well, which means we are going to need to extract both ways. More pictures of all of that later, but for now there is something even bigger going on in our hives….

A queen cell (!)

The images above show a fully developed queen cell which looks like a peanut and hangs from the bottom of a frame filled with a larva and royal jelly from the Barracks hive.

It is likely that this meant that the colony was preparing to swarm which means it was getting ready to split in half with half of the bees taking off, and half staying behind… Since we’d greatly prefer that all of our bees stay put, we had to destroy this extra queen.

The Barracks hive also had some supercedure cells, but these did not have eggs or larva in them so we left them.

We were not able to fully check the Boathouse hive as a chunk of comb was broken when we removed the first frame and things got a little hairy….So we will have to do a more thorough check next time.

Honey

After this check, we purchased some used traditional extraction equipment so the next time we go visit the bees, it’s likely we’ll be pulling off some honey! If you’d like to buy some, check out our facebook page over the coming weeks for more info. If you go there, you’ll see that our honey is going to be labelled as ‘Smiling Moose Honey’. Kids and grandparents may have been involved in choosing this name 😉