Eight weeks in, the package is ready for a new box
The
package we installed at the beginning of June consumed a lot of sugar
water at first, slowed down a bit, then a week or two ago began
taking nearly a quart a day again. Since the
swarm we captured a few weeks later didn't show the same trend of increasing
their sugar-water consumption recently, I figured that meant our
package was building new comb. Sure enough, a photo up
through the bottom of the hive on Monday showed bee activity in
the lower box for the first time.
On Thursday morning,
I noticed bees bearding on the outside of that hive.
Bearding can mean the hive is too hot, but since these bees were
bearding first thing on a cool morning, I suspected it was instead
a sign of congestion inside the hive. I'd go sit on the
porch too if I was sharing an apartment with tens of thousands of
roommates.
Sure enough, a photo
up through the bottom on Thursday showed even more bees in the
lower box. When I take a photo up into a hive, I stick my
camera directly on the screen and don't zoom, so you can tell how
close the bees are to the camera by size. They look about
twice as big in the photo above compared to the one at the top of
this post, so I'm guessing the bees were nearly touching the
screen when this second photo was taken. While there are too
many bees to guess how much of the second box is now full of drawn
comb, I figured it was time to expand their living space.
I snuck a bit of
smoke under the quilt as well as in the entrance, and was then
able to lift the two boxes plus quilt to the side and add a new
box underneath without straining myself or bothering the
bees. Kayla came along to take the photo above (and to get a
bit of experience since she's considering embarking on
beekeeping), and was amazed at how calm the bees acted. This
set of bees is definitely my nicest hive --- I have to plop the
sugar water in the entrance feeder and run to prevent suiting up
when visiting our barn swarm.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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