A beautiful mid-80’s day in Walberg Heights made our 3rd new hive inspection pleasant, smooth, and sweaty. At least for Blumbin’ Bee it was. Frau Imkerin is always cool.
Bob was at 94 degrees and noisy after a smoky entrance. The outer 2 frames are still pretty much untouched. Once Bumblin’ got into the middle it was very exciting. When he pulled out frame 7 he knew something good was going on.
That is one full frame, in addition drone comb on the bottom. Notice the drone cells are larger than the normal worker bee cells? Top corners of honey and nearly total capped brood looks awesome. Here is a beautiful blanket of capped brood from frame 5.
Overall Bumblin’ Bee is very happy with Bob. There is a good chance new bees will begin to emerge next week. That is under the assumption that it took one week to build comb and Roberta laid immediately. Three weeks later should be the magic time frame. Since the packages were installed on 4/16, eggs should have been laid by 4/23. That means 21 days later, around 5/14, the now adult bees should start to chew their way out of the comb and join the colony.
