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05/03/2006 Archived Entry: "Crowded house"

The bees have gone through another inspection.

Despite moving hive 1 from a nuc to a deep the bees are still bearding at the entrance. They have gone and made comb on the frames. I only have like one side of one frame where they haven't at least built comb. The bees have also made the comb in a bit of a messy manner. I think I am going to let them build the brood chamber in the with the weird shaped comb. I have rotated the frames again to get them to finish building on the last frame and move the mainly honey frames to the edges of the brood box. The small hive beetles are almost non existant in the hive. I believe part of that is simple due to the number of bees. There is a lot of burr comb between the frames, I am leaving that in place so the queen can easily move between frames. I have more medium boxes coming Thurday according to the seller. I am going to add another brood chamber to hive one and then from there it is honey supers.

Hive 2 has a very small bearding problem but not much of one. The permacomb that was added last month has been accepted and is being very readily used. However most of the cells are drone cells. They tops of the frames are honey the lower part being brood drone cells. The bees in this hive are still abit more aggressive than I would like. They popped Janel in the head twice while she was taking pictures of the second hive. The honey super on top is doing very well and almost ready for extraction. I rotated the frames so the bees would finish capping them with honey. The hive will get one more medium on top for honey also . I think that will be enough for that hive.

So things right now are looking good. The small hive beetle numbers are way down. The bee population is way up. It looks like I should be able to get honey extraction next month. I could do it this month with the one honey super but I wouldn't get the full amount.

The biggest problem right now is the second hive is hot, that means the bees are aggessive not killer bee aggressive but they are more likely to come after you than leave you alone. In a beeeeper outfit this is no problem however Janel did not have one, and she got stung twice on the top of the head. She was very unhappy about that and made it known. So I have to get the wife a beekeeper veil.

I could requeen or split on it but for now I am going to leave it alone. I have finally called the State of Florida agriculture department. I am going to move toward getting the hives made legit. It doesn't mean the county will allow them but at least they won't be able to destroy them.

I also convinced my sister to let me keep a couple of hives on her property. I just have to build her a gardenstand like I did for my wife.

You can view pictures of my last inspection here