may bee pictures

it's been a while since i posted pictures of the bees. these pictures i've got at the bottom of this post are almost a month old now so the bees have made much more progress since them. but we've not taken any more recent shots.

in these pictures you can see that they've built the comb, laid brood, and started capping honey.




not a great shot, but you can see the marked queen at the bottom.


the hubby checking out a frame. you can see that they've built comb down on the bottom of this frame. we have to clean that up periodically so they don't start building the frames together (which they did this last time we checked.)


the capped brood is all throughout the middle of the frame. capped honey is in the bottom right of this picture. the watery-looking stuff throughout the frame is honey in the process of becoming honey.

since these shots were taken a few weeks ago we have added another box (a super) with 10 more frames on top of each hive. when we checked them this past weekend the one hive was really far along in having the top box filled with honey-in-progress. the second hive is a little slower, but they're still moving along in there too. it had been over 2 weeks since our last check on the hives, so things were quite a mess. as i mentioned earlier in this post, a top and a bottom frame were stuck together, so when we went to pull the frame out it pulled the one under it too. that was a little tricky to fix. also, they attached one of the frames to the side of box so that when we took it out it ripped the entire frame. not sure if they'll be able to fix that. but we'll check this weekend and see what's happened.