Nooo! Don’t swarm!

I was freaked out this past week because I thought the girls were getting ready to bolt. I thought I’d given them such a lovely home, all the sugar syrup they could drink, flowers galore, everything their little hearts desired, and yet, look at that picture! They were crowding out around the entrance well into the evening like they were getting ready to bolt. I felt like half the hive was out.

Well, disaster narrowly averted. Apparently, I had the bottom board flipped into “winter mode”, which meant the height of the opening was smaller. As a result, the girls were just getting overheated. In Seattle! Anyway, I flipped it over to summer mode, giving them better ventilation, and all returned to normal. Whew!

Checking in

Took a peek today to make sure they had found the new frames I put in last month. Sometimes the queen excluder can throw them and they don’t find it, but didn’t appear to be a problem. They’d drawn the comb and started to fill the cells nicely. I caught a glimpse of the queen (green dot on her back in the right-most picture) when I was down in the brood chamber (I wanted to make sure she was below the excluder).