Weather: Hot and sunny
Stings: None
Today I did the first full inspection of the year and was quite pleased with what I found. There is brood on six combs and stores on at least as many more. Brood in all stages too. I did
Image via Wikipedian't see the queen but I did see eggs and lots of larva. Plus there was lots of capped brood and even a little bit of drone comb here and there. No queen cells though.So the bees are doing well. They have more than enough stores to keep them going, the weather is good and they are bringing in nectar and pollen. They are pretty well set. It is going to be a very strong colony very soon.
What I also did today was start the process of moving them on to fresh comb. I'll admit now that this is a gamble. Not all the comb they are moving to is drawn and they will have to work hard to get that done. I don't think that's going to be a problem because they are making wax for brood. I had to mash a few larva in comb that had been built on top of the frames. I'm worried though because I'm not sure they have enough room in which to expand.
What is true now that the fresh comb, queen and other bees are in the bottom brood box is that they do have more room. And the queen has places to put eggs. Will it be enough? Not sure. I'd guess that they are happier to build comb where the queen wants to lay than in places to put stores. And some of those stores will be consumed as they produce wax. This is all by way of re-assuring myself that I've not made a stupid mistake.
If I have messed up then there is not much I can do about it. I do not have any more drawn comb for them to use. I can feed them so they have more stores to use but I don't think that will be the problem as there is plenty of forage for them. It's more a question of whether they can drawn the comb quick enough to satisfy the queen.
I was convinced that I'd get stung today as I messed the bees around a lot. I smoked them, moved all the frames around, peered at them and shook them up a lot. But apart from the odd bee bothering me to see what I was doing they were pretty docile. I'll miss this queen when she is gone.
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