Hungry Young Bees

We've seen many more bees doing their orientation flights and we checked the hive yesterday. They had not drawn out any of the new frames so we gave them 5 frames of honey we'd saved from Malka's work. 

They were pretty upset in the moment: the pitch and volume of the buzz went up like a guitar solo, the air filled with bees and the landing board looked like a mosh pit, but they were greeting, not fighting. We imagine that suddenly finding their hive smelling Wrong they all rushed around searching for the Wrong Bees they could smell, but for each bee, each other bee they checked was friend, not foe. Things calmed down a bit later. 

This morning, the concert is over and under the hive are plenty of neatly removed white cappings, I wonder if they're eating the honey we gave them or checking it in, relabelling and processing it. 

Late Summer

The new bees in the Eastern Hive (was called 3/4 Hive) have been making a lot more bees lately, we've been seeing lots of bees and laser Saturday (11 March) we had a look in. The queen has laid a lot of brood in both boxes and so we added a top box in the hope they'll find enough nectar to make honey for winter, otherwise we'll feed them. 

The other hive didn't do as well. 

On 27 January we saw heaps of wax moth in it. A healthy hive will not let this happen. We saw remnant bees, still bringing nectar in but there was no brood and no queen. We let the old bees live there until they died.  

We don't know what happened. 

We had our bee mentor post mortem with us and there was no sign of AFB or anything. 

Back then the Eastern Hive was a small 2 box colony but healthy. It didn't need another box, had no wax moth, but didn't have much honey (it's been a bad year). 

In late January our mentor's suggestion was this possible plan for the future: 

We probably want to feed the Eastern Hive in the next couple of months so they can eat the sugar syrup in Winter and make floral honey in Spring, we have kept some honey frames, which is nicer than sugar solution. 

We want to end up with two hives, both with 3/4 frames (hence the name change) so we'll need to get a second 3/4 set up ready for Spring. 

Towards that end we should check frames, get rid of black or mothridden wax and re-wax. Also, get rid of anything we don't want to keep.