Bearding, Brood Boxes, and Swarm Cells. Oh My!

Happy Friday, folks! Today was another inspection day! It was a busy day for sure. First off, I got a text from Tim today showing me that my girls were bearding on the front of the hive today. They've never done that before!

It was a warm day and sometimes they "go onto the front porch" to cool off. But it was definitely getting crowded in there, too. So, a third brood box was definitely necessary. This brings me to a little problem. I have two Medium boxes left, BUT, they are both covering my feeder right now! A single Medium box isn't high enough to put the cover on. I don't have a spare deep, so I need some help fast. 

Tim to the rescue! He built a cedar feeding box for me! He made it cedar so it would match the rest of my boxes. What a good egg, right?! I finished staining it yesterday and it was dry today so it was ready to be put to use. He even put handles on it. I love it so much! He's such a good guy. 

Alright, that means that now I can use one of my Mediums for a third brood box and have one to spare! Awesome! 

We opened the hive and Tim maneuvered the frames so I could take a few pics of my frames for you. All of the frames were drawn so the hive was definitely ready for another box.

Here is a frame with a great brood pattern. Victoria is kicking ass! In the upper right hand corner you can see a bit of honey capped as well. You can see the difference in color between the brood caps and the honey caps as well.

You can see her handy work here as well. The larvae are so amazing to see! The nurse bees are busy taking care of them.

Here is a little closeup of that same picture. They look like little bagels in there! I love seeing the babies! 

I will check on them again next week to see how much they've built out the third box. They will store honey in there as well. We could be a couple weeks out from putting on the honey super! That will be amazing. 

So on we went to check out Tim's hives. Unfortunately, one of his hives is most likely queenless. We found older capped brood but no eggs or larvae. When we pulled out a brood frame, we found another surprise.

At the very top of this picture is a swarm cell. It's a queen cell but it was on the bottom of the frame. There were other queen cells along that frame as well. No eggs, larvae and finding queen cells are pretty big indicators that the hive is without a queen. It's a shame too as she was an overwintered queen. She was just not producing quickly at all. She may have died or they killed her and are making a new one to carry on the colony.

The rest of the hives are doing well. They all have honey supers on them and are slowing making the golden nectar! 

Next week could be exciting since my hive has a ton of bees now. They could easily build out that box pretty quickly. I'm pretty excited to check on them for sure.

Until next time, bee kind 🐝