Adding a honey super

The girls looked like they had made good headway in filling up the two brood chambers, so it was time to put the first honey super. I went in pretty early in the day, around 10:30 a.m., when the mass of them would be out in the field scouting out nectar and pollen. I usually don’t use smoke, because it sets them back a bit (they gorge on honey in anticipation of a potential emergency move). Instead, I prefer sugar water in a spray bottle, but for some reason decided to go with smoke this time. It was kind of a pain to keep it lit, though, so I ended up switching back to the water.

I checked the brood in the lower chambers and it was solid, so I was on my way. One of my queen excluders had to be jerry-rigged a bit on the sides with duct tape, the other was more normal. I just laid it right on top of the upper box, plopped the 3/4 Western on top of that, added a feeding chamber as icing on the cake, and topped it off with the lid. Nuthin’ to it.

Wax Sculpture Pt II

The experiment was, sadly, a failure. The girls chewed right through the string and filled in wax pretty much everywhere they could except anywhere near the objects I had so lovingly placed in their midst. Ah well, I guess that’s why they call them “worker bees” instead of “artist bees”.

Wax Sculpture

So when I took out the queen cage, I noticed that the bees had built burr comb all around it. It looked beautiful, so I held onto it and mounted it as “art”. That got me to thinking…what if I put something else in the hive, would they build burr comb around that, too? So, with a lot of help from Julie, I put together a sort of fake frame and suspended a few objects from it (a mini vase, a honey dipper, a stone, a key) and put it into Hive 2. Now, I’ll wait a couple of weeks and see what happens! Hopefully, I’ll have some objects with comb built around them that I can exhibit.