First Check of the Honey Supers

The weather this week has been absolutely gorgoeus with cool breezes, sunshine, and temperatures in the mid-80's. The bees have been happily buzzing about their activities and we've spent several evenings watching them from our lawn chairs as they bring in pollen and nectar. The sunflowers and grasses we planted next to the hives have grown tall and are starting to provide shade for the bees.

Diana is faithful in keeping the water bowls filled for the bees, though the neighbors behind us have just put up a big plastic swimming pool. We'll have to keep our fingers crossed that the bees don't notice the swimming pool and find water either in our yard or farther away. The baby bees are quickly becoming foragers and mature bees. Diana had a little bee land on her arm last night as we sat watching the hives. We were able to follow the bee for some time as she groomed and stretched on Diana's arm, seemingly unaware of our presence. Such amazing little creatures.

I checked out a stack of old texts from the University library on bee keeping and we've been looking up various questions regarding our hives. One of the things that has been puzzling us is the large number of girls that hang out on Hive 1 and just seem to linger on the flight deck and up the front of the hive boxes. We found a paragraph in one of the books that called this behavior "washboarding" because they seem to move back and forth slightly as they sit on the hive. No one is sure why they are doing this, but it seems to increase as the day goes on. I wondered if it was fanning behavior to cool the hive and evaporate excess water from the nectar....but their wings don't seem to be moving while they sit there on the deck or hive front. I suppose some things are meant to be a mystery.

We decided to open the hives this morning--it has been over a week since we placed a honey super on each one. The bees were very docile and hardly seemed to notice our presence. Hive 2 has begun working on drawing out the new comb in probably 4 of the 10 frames. Hive 1 has done nothing and there were maybe 15 or 20 bees in the top super as compared to a good 40 or 50 in Hive 2. We'll just have to wait and see what happens! We are in the middle of the honey flow here so I assume they still have nectar and pollen to gather, but maybe they're still focused on feeding brood and drawing out comb in the brood boxes below the honey super. In any case, it was a very pleasant visit and we were glad to have disturbed them so little this time around.