Late October Inspection

The day before Halloween I decided to get a quick peek into the hive during my lunch break. The weather is unseasonably warm but still not overly hot for 76 mostly because of the wind was pushing 10mph. The adjective of today's inspection was to just see how much resources the bees had for winter. I am hoping that this year having 2 hive that one will successfully make it through the winter. I started this season a little late. I procured my first hive (hive #1) May 18th and that was quite the task removing them from an old excavator at work. Second hive (hive #2) was a NUC I purchased from Hartville Honey that I picked up June 6th.

Hive #1

I started with hive #1 that I have set up with 2 deep boxes. I stopped feeding them at the end of May which hind site is why they will winter in a double brood instead of a single. The comb that I saved from the removal has been nothing short of a nightmare for inspections so I tried really hard to add lots of new foundation and the second deep to get more comb since I started with 0. I should have had some from last years failed colony but needless to say someone learned a hard lesson about wax moths. Back to the inspection. I found that that the outside frames had been built about half way but had very little nectar stored in them. As I moved in the frames had been built out more and I began to see a lot of capped honey and nectar in areas where brood was. When I got to center frames on the top box I found the queen. She was in the same area in the previous inspection about a week and a half ago. She seems healthy and moving around but I found no eggs or capped brood in the top. I did not check the bottom box as I was running out of time and I wanted to quickly inspect hive #2. I am hoping that this is the natural brood break as the colony should be preparing for winter. My lack of experience does make me nervous that I will not have any colonies come spring but I am hopeful because they are a proven colony that has been going for the last 5 years on there own. I will say that I did not use any smoke on the hive today and they seemed to be in the best mood. I did not have any bees come shooting out after removing the inner cover. Hoping that is another good sign of a health happy colony.

Hive #2

This inspection was a little more spicy. I was hoping after quite inspection from hive #1 that these girls would be in a good mood but I was wrong. As soon as I removed the inner cover they came straight to my face. The guard bees took no mercy on my gloves I had at least 5 bees leave there stingers in leather gloves. Now not having a smoker and only having a half suit on I felt inclined to make this a quick inspection to. I don't mind getting stung but its not my favorite past time. This hive is setup with a deep and a super on top. Once again I did not feed the bees for more than a week because I felt we where in a strong flow when I picked them up. So needless to say I felt like the hive was a little week after the first month so I ended up taking a frame of brood form hive #1 and donating it. Then 2 weeks later I did it again. That seemed to put the bees in a really good spot and I had bees on every frame. I then decided about a month ago to add the super and the reasoning I told my self was I want to give these bees lots of food for the winter. I was going to make sure by donating 5 frames of honey I had frozen from the previous years failure. So now I checked about 4 frames on the top and found no brood but a lot of the honey was still capped from the donation. At this point I had ran out of time and I had 30 bees bouncing off my veil and I bee that was determined to chew through a seam in my suit.

Summary

I believe that I need to do one more complete inspection of the hive before winter. Lucky for me next week we are going to hopefully have a 78 degree day. At that point I need to mark down everything I see frame to frame. Then at the very least if I lose all my colonies this winter I will have learned something and hopefully become a better beekeeper.