I opened up the hive and looked in the honey super. There was still nothing being done in the super. So I removed it to see what was going on in the two brood chambers.
The top brood chamber has alot of honey. It weighs about 50 or so pounds!!! I found that in this box that every frame has alot of stored honey and pollen and not much room for brood. It looks like once the brood has hatched that the cells are being used for honey/pollen storage.
I didn't see any signs of wax moth or hive beetles in this box. But there were a lot of ants on the outside of the whole hive.
There were many more bees since the last visit and I saw quite a few new hatchlings. I also saw brood that were ready to be capped and capped brood, in the top box.
Once I checked each of the frames of the top box I put everything back together in it and removed it so I could access the bottom box.
The bottom box was very light. This is where I found the queen. She has moved down from the top box to the bottom box to lay more eggs. Each of the frames has honey and pollen but nothing like the top box frames.
I went through all of the frames and did not see any wax moth or hive beetles!!! Once I finished with the bottom box I put the hive back together and left the honey super installed with the queen excluder.
I talked with a local bee keeper and told him about what was going on in the honey super. He advised me to use a feeder jar of 1:1 sugar water to get the bees to draw comb in the honey supers. I did that today so I will see what the girls do with that in a week.
I put down some insecticide to take care of the ants. I also used a weedeater to clean up the grass and plant growth around the hive stand. Bee fertilizer seems to do wonders to the grass!
The hive, over all seems healthy to me. They are storing quite a bit of honey right now. They have stored so much honey in the upper brood box that I was very tempted to sample that honey...
My Dad took several photos with his Sony MVC=CD300, here they are...
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