Thinking with my hands yet.: Hormonal

On Boxing Day Hippolyta's colony in the Flow hive were tense, warning us off: flying back and forth in front of my face and stinging our gloves a little, so we stopped the inspection after four frames as we already knew they needed more space and soon. Also that whatever mood they were in, we'd have to bother them again to give space to them.

We thought about various options and decided to add an ordinary super of ordinary deep frames above a queen excluder. The next day I ordered frames from Ceracell and early the morning after, they arrived. We set up the super in a "brood box" I'd ordered previously from Flow.

We inspected the Flow hive, it was teeming with bees and there was brood comb stuffed in everywhere, including into the middle of the feeder. We took 3 or 4 frames of honey from the brood boxes up to the super and put naked foundation in instead. We also removed a queen cell we believe to be a swarm cell, no wonder they were acting tense, I expect they were feeling expectantly hormonal and Hippolyta would have been passing on pheromones with the added stress of preparing to move house.

http://scientificbeekeeping.com/understanding-colony-buildup-and-decline-part-7b/

Sean and Iris also have put another super on the 3/4 hive, and we hope that with two supers they might have enough honey for us to harvest some! We made a lid for them that's framed transparent PET and so we looked in after a day or two but the new super was so full of bees that it was difficult to see what they were doing.

Since the super went on the Flow hive, they have been happily building comb next to the windows in the upper brood box, and I also popped a wee comb receptacle above the hole in the middle of the Flow hive lid, in case they want to build up there in the middle again. It's a carefully cleaned wee box that came with commercial honeycomb inside it, upside-down on some foundation all wrapped in paper and with a hole for the bees to get into it. I have not planned how I'm going to harvest this wee box, but if the lid feels excitingly heavy, I expect I'll think of something.

With a bit of space and the lack of the queen cell, the Flow hive colony must have been feeling much more serene because while I was adding the wee box with no smoke or suit (not my wisest moment, but I'm trying to keep this journal factual), the hive lid went a bit skew and, although a goodly number of bees spilled out and I squashed some putting it straight, none chose to sting me.

So tall!