Monday, June 8, 2009

Bees at 7 weeks, time for a home expansion

It's now been seven weeks since we installed our bees and nearly three weeks since our last visit. We brought a second hive body along thinking they might be ready to expand. Sure enough it looked like they were ready. We didn't pull the frames at all but you could see bees between each one with some comb built out. We added a second body and five frames to it. In a few days we'll head back to fill in the other five frames once we've got them put together. Images below are before and after adding the second hive body.












It would have been nice to pull frames and look for the queen, but we really don't want to disturb their comb any more when we don't need too. The number of bees has certainly gone way up and it will be interesting to see how soon they fill up this second body. We have two suppers ready to be assembled and a queen excluder too. Hopefully we'll get some good comb production and be able to add them in another few weeks so that we'll have some honey to harvest in the fall.

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