Day 20 – beeHIVE check in

ONE BROOD BOX OR TWO?

We decided to go with one deep brood box with one medium brood box for both of our hives. 10 days into that decision, it seems like it’s working really well for the Boathouse hive. They have almost filled the medium with comb, and about 60% of it is uncapped honey already. So that is good news. 

For the Barracks hive, it looks like a different story. They don’t seem nearly as far along, and I’m worried they may never make it to filling the super that’s on there, so maybe we should have left them with just the one deep brood box. But time will tell. Maybe they will catch up? 

BOATHOUSE HIVE

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This was a friend’s first time visiting our bee yard, and I posted the first picture there because I loved her expression – it looks as if she is opening a present! I hope she’ll be back as it was really helpful to have her there.

The mediums (2nd picture) are filling up with comb and uncapped honey very quickly, and the deeps (3rd picture) seem to be doing well. In the third picture you can see capped honey at the top, capped brood covering most of the rest of the frame, and then some uncapped honey and some larvae in the little that is left. This is good, and this is one of the frames with no foundation that the ladies fully built out in the past 20 days. Amazing!

Again we didn’t see the queen, but we did see larvae on deep frames that weren’t built out the last time we were in here, so we know that she must have been around in the last 10 days. 

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Overall, I think this hive is strong, but I have a limited frame of reference – I can say for sure that it seems much stronger than the other one.

Barracks Hive

We had some technical difficulties so we don’t have pictures from the Barracks hive, but we can say that they are coming along, but much further behind. We didn’t see the queen, but she has laid on frames that were built in the last 10 days, so she has been there. They have started building comb in the mediums and have some uncapped honey in there, but not much…

Flow Hive 2 Araucaria Supers

We are excited to be working with the Flow Hives as they should make extraction a much easier process. About 10 days ago, when we added the Flow supers, we weren’t sure whether the bees would make it to them by the time we checked in again (especially because we added the medium brood boxes at the same time), and today we found that they hadn’t really.

In the Boathouse hive, there were about a couple of hundred bees wandering around the flow super, but they weren’t really doing anything in there yet. I’m not sure what they were doing? Does anyone know?

In the Barracks hive, there were just 2 bees in exploring the Flow super frames. 

Flow Hive Extraction Plan – Version 1.0

Ever the optimist, I did a quick poll on facebook to see what packaging people prefer, and have now purchased some glass jars (330g size). Also purchased some 1.9L (half gallon) wide mouth mason jars, and some recap lids. Lastly, we purchased a 5 gallon pail with a honey gate.

The plan is to run the flow hive tubes into the wide mouth mason jars, then pour those into the 5 gallon pail. Leave that for a couple of days so that the air bubbles rise out, and then bottle from that pail. That’s the current plan unless I see a better way for flow hive extraction.