June 6, 2010 - 10:00 am

It was 80º, partly sunny at the bee yard.

Swarm Hive
Lot of activity at entrance of hive. The bees are very active. Opened up the hive and the bees covered the inner cover. There are 5 frames drawn with bees covering them. I checkerboarded two frames of foundation with brood frames in the top hive body. I'll see how they do with that next week and if things look good I'll add a honey super. The cordovan bees are pretty much everywhere now in this hive. While looking through the top hive body frames I found eggs,larva and capped brood. I didn't look for anything else at that point so I put the hive back together and moved on the the other hives. The bees didn't need to be smoked today. They were very calm throughout my entire visit.

Beta Hive
Hundred or so bees on the porch with many bees coming and going. I opened up the hive to look through the honey supers. There are maybe a hundred or so bees in the top honey super. That one is only foundation. The next super down has drawn comb and there are a few thousand in that one and it looks and feels like they are storing more nectar. The bottom most honey super is very heavy and has about 5 frames of that are capped! I removed the queen excluder in the hopes that it will allow more freedom of movement. The bees were agitated today! Several of them fly right at me out of the honey supers and began to sting my suit! At the entrance to the hive the bees didn't pay any attention to me at all! So I'm not certain why the other bees were so agitated.

Alpha Hive
There was so much more entrance activity to this hive than I have seen in a long time. They were more bees coming and going than in the Beta hive! I removed the honey super and found that the bees just aren't moving up there! I put everything back together.

I cut the grass around the hive stand. That grass sure is healthy around the hives.