Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Swarm check-up

It had been about 3 days from the night of the capture of the swarm. I had been feeding the bees regularly with sugar water and they had started to draw out comb in there. Actually I had forgotten to put the 10th frame in there because I left that space to pour the bees into. When I lifted the inner cover to check on the bees a the day after I hived them, there was a mass of bees milling around on the underside of the inner cover. I turned it upside down to get a better look at what they were doing, and saw they were all covering a ruby-shaped object sticking up in the air. I guess I would've known had I had more experience with bees, but of course upon getting a closer look, I saw that object was some comb they'd recently built. Marvelling at their work, I sat there for a second debating whether to put in the 10th frame or leave them with their comb hanging from the ceiling. I decided to leave it as it was, but as I was turning it back over to replace it in the hive body, the comb broke off and slid down the inner cover and onto the floor. Too bad... Since I broke it off on accident, I robbed them of their comb to show it off to the family, and gave them the 10th frame to work on. 

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