An amazing sunny spring day and I finally got around to opening up the hive. I’ve been wanting to get this done for a while but even though its been sunny the past two weeks the wind’s been cold. But today it was beautiful, sunny and 22 degrees. So time to start sorting out the bees.
This is a Layens type hive I was given in February. At some point it had fallen over and the frames had fallen into the bottom of the hive. The bees had a little fondant in February to see them through – they may not have needed it but I had no idea what sort of stores they had so a bit of food seemed wise. Because the frames had all fallen into the bottom of the hive the bees had simply built comb in any way they saw fit. However there was a division board and about a quarter to a third of the bees hadn’t had access to. The plan was to get the division board out, put some frames into the empty space and move the entrance in line with the new frames.
I actually couldn’t believe how even tempered the bees were – they didn’t even look at me. The next part might be a little harder. The hope is the bees will migrate to the new frames and it’ll be possible to clear out the mess in the other end of the hive. I think that might get them a little more wound up.
The photos don’t really show how bad the inside of the hive is – the camera on my phone didn’t do a very good job of capturing the inside of a dark hive on a very sunny day. And I didn’t have much of the top of the hive open. What I like about this sort of hive is that rather than opening the whole top of the hive I could just slide the quilt box to the side as far as necessary to access the bits I wanted to get to – much less disturbance for the bees. Once I have the frames back in I shall probably use a canvas cloth across to the top of the frames to give me that control over what’s open and exposed.
