The hives both look ready for another box, they have almost finished packing the boxes they have.
Malka has two brood boxes and a honey super above a Queen Excluder and, new today, a transparent hive mat so we can look in and see how things are going without making a draught. Things are going gangbusters! They've nearly finished building the all the comb to put honey into already! Iris is very proud of them, especially as some of it is foundationless (see Sean with frame below).
Hippolyta has two brood boxes, one of which has beautiful windows. We only inspected quarter of her frames before Amazons started sizing me up, but in that time it was obvious the reason they're feeling fraught might be cabin fever: they need more space. I was interested to discover that all the honey I found in the Flow hive was quite liquid, but the pohutukawa has only been in blossom for a couple of weeks so maybe they haven't finished concentrating the nectar down yet.
Although I didn't look at every frame, there was burr comb with drone brood in it.
So I inspected that instead (photo cred Sebastian), and didn't find any varroa (Hurrah!) even though we were really busy selling our old house so we missed doing an inspection last fortnight, drones are the tastiest, and brood is white so rust coloured mites show up really easily.
The coloured ovals are their eyes.
Next we need to sort out a new box for each hive. Malka needs frames assembled. Hippolyta needs us to choose whether to try Flow frames here or not, and then to do whatever it is we decide. I wish I could ask their opinion.
