Changing Weather, Changing Plans

The rainy weather forecasted for the week has mostly been at night, with partly cloudy and sunny days. I know I said previously that I wouldn’t be touching the hives for a couple of weeks but plans do change. I initially went out just to heft the Roman honey super to get a feel for how it was filling up. To my amazment there were hundreds of dead bees in front of the hive and they were stinking.

After a 5-minute panic attack I realized it was, of course, my fault. But it wasn’t a bad thing. As I inspected them closer I realized they were all drones. When I added the 2nd brood box four days ago I added a frame of dead drone brood. I had pulled it a couple of weeks ago and frozen it. Within 3 days they had cleaned them all out.

It had rained on them every night and the dead bees were starting to ferment. I scraped and shoveled up any many as I could and raked the rest into the gravel, then added another 2-inch layer of gravel.

Back to the original task …

The honey super was 80% full so I added another one. I went through the top brood box and saw the drone frame that caused the earlier panic was entirely clean.

Even though I was curious, I didn’t touch the Pasta hive I had just re-queened four days ago. There wasn’t a lot of activity but I knew there was nothing positive I could do. Any disruption at this point would not be beneficial to the new queen. Since I was already suited up and the smoker was going I decided to continue on.

The honey super on Carny was full too. It was ready for another super but I realized all I had was new foundation. I also remembered that Carny is a 10-frame hive and I really didn’t want to add another 10-frame honey super on top of the original. I decided to split the honey frames into the Middle hive setting next to it.

Middle was a single brood box waiting for the virgin queen to get established, I hope. I didn’t want to disturb it but figured just adding a super and not interrupting the brood nest would be OK. I added a fume board on top of Carny. While that was doing its magic I grabbed queen excluder, 8-frame super, and new foundation frames. I took out four frames of honey from Carny, shook off the bees, and checker-boarded them into Middle with the four new foundation frames. I then checker-boarded the remaining four new foundation frames to replace the ones I had removed into Carny. I’m only running nine frames in this 10-frame hive.

After today I realized I need to plan a little better. Now that we have five hives things can happen a little quicker. If I had to add 5 more supers during the current honey flow I’m not sure I’d be ready. It’s time to take a supply inventory and see if we need anything.