Hive inspection

Another hive inspection day today. It went well. It's been dreadful weather recently. Lots of rain over the past week and very little sun. Today was warm (over 25c) and the bees were out flying when I arrived on site despite the intermittent sun.

First, hive one (brood-and-a-half plus one honey super). The comb in the honey super was a little more built out, but again the outer few frames were still little better than over-embossed foundation. In the central frames, though, there were 5 frame faces of capped honey. In the brood boxes, there was the usual encouraging mix of honey, pollen (a little light on this?), eggs (in both boxes), large and small uncapped larvae, and capped larvae. I did not see the queen, but the presence of the eggs was enough to satisfy me that all was functioning properly. One thing I did do was to swap 2 of the frames from the brood super into the honey super. They came from the outside of the brood super, and were honey which was largely capped. I moved it into the outside of the honey super. I'm keen to get one super's worth of honey (~30 jars) out of the bees this year - it would be a real milestone and high-point of the season. It shouldn't be beyond these bees - they do seem so healthy and despite the terrible weather we've had recently if the next few weeks are fine they'll certainly have no excuse not to fill at least one super.

Hive two (single brood box, no supers) is also in good shape. There was a good combination of honey (some), pollen, eggs, uncapped larvae and capped larvae (lots!). I was left wondering whether there was enough honey for the impending births to eat. The apparent slight shortage might well be down to the fact that it's a relatively new colony combined with the recent duff weather. There were still 2 frames at the back of the box which so not have drawn out comb. Hopefully the weather will be good enough for the foragers to get busy drawing out this comb and filling it up with nectar in the coming week. When I do my next inspection (~10 days) I'll have a super waiting by in case they look like they'll need room to expand. Oh, and I saw the queen too. She's got a white spot, and I've got to admit it's a lot easier to spot than the green dot on the queen in hive 1, especially with my marginal red/green colour vision deficiency. I'll have to get some more experienced keeper to persuade me that the regime of colour coding per year is really worth it, else I'm tempted to go down the route of always marking my queens in white as some other keepers do.

What follows, I think, is interesting, and I'll blog it for the record (for me as much as anything else). Now, I also tried to move hive 2 closer to the edge of the site to try to address the concerns of the site manager that the hives would interfere with use of the site. I've prepared a board for the hive to sit on quite close to a wall, and this morning the hive was about 3 meters away from this board. Moving the hive isn't too much of a challenge since it's only stand+floor+brood box+crown-board+roof, and I can just about grapple this from the top and stagger short distances with it. I tried moving it about half the distance to the desired site. No luck. Returning foragers congregated at the old site in ever increasing numbers, looking for their lost home with no success. Watching the hive entrance, I saw foragers leaving but none returning. I waited 10 minutes or so, but there was no change to the situation. Perhaps I could have waited longer, but I decided to move the hive back, to around 1 meter (perhaps a little more) away from the original site. As I stood back I saw the landing board covered with returning foragers. Amazing - I mean I only moved the hive 40-50 centimeters back! After 5 minutes or so the air around the hive have pretty much normalised and cleared of the excess of foragers. Now, here's the interesting part. I returned in the afternoon (a few hours later) and tried moving the hive another meter away. No luck, and again the returning foragers could not find the hive. However, instead of returning to the location they had left from, they instead started buzzing around the location where the hive had originally been early that morning. I moved the hive back a little and again the foragers suddenly crowded the landing board. It does seem, then, that bees do take a while to re-normalise their sense of location of home, and have a memory of "previous home". Sure, I've hardly been very scientific here, but it's not my intention to experiment. Back to the point: I'll pop back in the next couple of days to make other small hive moves with the intention of getting hive 2 into a more discrete position within the site. I do so hope this will satisfy the powers that be. Let's see.