Inspection Date

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I’m not always present when Kris inspects a bee hive, but the other day we were unexpectedly blessed to accomplish this task together. It’s been warm where we keep this hive and we figured the bees would be needing some more space, so we wanted to add some frames for them to build on. We got suited up, smoked the hive, and opened it up. Wow, they had been busy. Kris pulled out one frame at a time.

There were frames filled with honey, frames with tons of drone cells, brood, and the coolest thing of all that I had never seen first hand before… freshly built queen cells.

They looked like little pitted olives with an egg inside each one. We removed them because the queen had just laid them and we were giving them more room anyway, so the hive wouldn’t split and swarm.

The hive is doing really well. The workers flying back into the hive had lots of different colors of pollen on their legs.

We also removed a frame of honey and two frames of brood accompanied by nurse bees to put in another hive that needed a little help.

We put the hive back together, put the box of honey and brood in the van, and we were on our way. We made a stop at the store and when we got back in the van we looked at the back windows and there were bees flying around! Oops. There was a hole in the box they could sneak out of. So we were driving down the freeway with bees on the inside of the windshield trying to find a way out. Kris was driving and I was trying to eat my lunch, all while bees buzzed by us. They settled down after a while though. We’ve driven with bees in the van before, but they’ve never gotten out. This was definitely a new experience.

So what started as a simple inspection turned out to be much more. Kris and I got to spend quality time together and really enjoyed seeing how hard the bees had been working. He sees that sort of thing way more often than I do, but what made it better was that we got to do it together.  We had a nice little inspection date.