Ambrose Hive - 2 weeks from Bee day

The day dawned warm and calm. We awoke with anticipation and excitement to go and see our colonies. It had been pretty much 2 weeks since we had seen the inside of the hives and are really curious about what is happening, did the bees accept the syrup? did the capped brood emerge? did the queen lay a bunch of new eggs? did the hive build more comb? Today is when we find out.





We decided to go the Ambrose hive first since we had not seen the inside of this hive for a full 2 weeks and this hive seemed to be taking more syrup. We slowly remove the outside cover and the inside cover to discover that there we a dozen or so bees happily feeding on the syrup.









The level of the 1 gallon feeder had gone down by about half. This was only since Monday! In this photo you can see we've added some rocks to the feeding tray, the idea is to try to minimize the number of drowned bees. So far so good we have only found a few drowned bees. One nice surprise was that the heat of the past few days didn't cause the air in the feeder to expand enough to cause the syrup to leak out. I have to say this is a bit of relief.




Inside the hive the number of bees had obviously increased. All of the 4 medium frames we received from Vic at Bees Incorporated were covered with bronze, twinkling, buzzing bees. The capped brood that we seen when we gotten our nucs had all emerged now. Practically both sides of all 4 of the original frames had honey, pollen, tiny eggs and brood compare to only to frames when we started. When we first got our bees the 2 outside frames only had honey and not all the comb had been drawn. Now that was not the case.

All the frames we received with our nucleus hive were now fully drawing and basically either full of eggs, brood, honey or honey and pollen. The pollen stores are amazing! Reds, yellows, oranges, browns and blacks.

The bees tuck it in cells here and there and every where but many around the perimeter of the brood cells. It was good to see that there was honey within easy reach of the brood cells as well. This is text book arrangement of a frame.

As you can see in this photo the center of the frame is not capped for the most part and when compared to the photo above which is, it tells me that this side of the frame has emerge, the queen has come around and laid more eggs. Now there are more brood developing continuing the cycle. The frame above along with another we didn't photograph will most likely be emerging in the next week providing the young bees that are best at nursing and comb building.


So our plan is to check these hives again in another few days to see how they are progressing with filling the deep frames with comb to expand the brood chamber beyond the 4 frames we got from our nuc. This photo shows drawing of comb on the first side of the first frame of our first hive's full deep frame. With the continuous increase of the number of bees the comb building speeds up, the queen's laying increases and the population exponentially expands. With a queen able to produce up to 2000 (that is thousand) eggs a day you can imagine what I mean.

In the second photo from the top of this post you can see there are 2 wooden frames. These frames are just that...frames. Pretty much all the photos so far show plastic frames with plastic foundation with a honey comb pattern on it. This pattern is NOT required and in fact contributes to the bees developing larger than they would normally in nature. When given a frame with no foundation they will draw comb with a more natural cell size. I've read they will actually more readily draw comb on an empty frame then a frame with foundation. I'll have to make a more detailed post on this topic soon.

Prior to placing the plywood on top of the bottom super we decided to scrape the brace comb wax off of it to prevent squishing some bees when we put it in place. This is the first gift the bees have for us.....a small ball of pure bee's wax. Thank you ladies for your wonderful gift.

Cate got her first bee sting a random happening or maybe not, bees can sense things beyond our senses; after all they can live in complete harmony in huge numbers. They only do what they're created to do. Maybe someday she will share our revelation about this "random" event.

So after fawning over the hive for a few more minutes and breathing in the magical atmosphere, all our questions answered; we re-assembled the top box and the feeder, make our way back to the truck and head for the Modomnoc hive.