Finding Queens and getting Stung!

The inspection of hive 1 was going great.  There were a few small hive beetles behind the frame arms and I was smashing them to the clear happiness of surrounding bees.  

Checking out frames with the optivisor and I could see details of eggs, capped and uncapped brood...and there she was, the queen!

I was super happy to have found her, however I didn't have my queen clip on me and wasn't able to mark her.

I managed to get a video showing the queen.  She is on the right middle part of the video, near the right edge of the frame, and has a much larger body than the bees around her.  She is a critical part of hive function and is constantly laying eggs.

I reassembled the hive and did a quick sugar treatment. 

Since that went so well i figured, heck, why not inspect hive 3, my ten frame with two supers/levels...what could go wrong?

I placed the super on the stand between hive 1 and 2...without a top or bottom...so you know, the bees start getting robbed but it's fine, because I'm busy with the bottom super having a great ol time looking for signs of the queen and don't notice anything wrong.

The bees were super friendly.  I removed 6 frames and found plenty of evidence a queen was laying.   I assembled the bottom super and was feeling super confident, using little to no smoke, everything was going great.

...until i looked right and noticed the super.  It was clear that bees were very unhappy about the situation.  I thought, I'll just go over there and quickly move them back....there was a quick nagging feeling that may not be so smart...naa it'll be fine.
bam bam bam three stings to my right hand.

While walking away I thought of ways to cover the supers while doing inspections.
Went and got some gloves and a suit, came back, smoked them good and reassembled the hive.

I'm thinking that next time I'll have a screened bottom board and top cover ready to stack the supers.

Bringing Home the Nucs!

The safest way to transport bees would NOT be in the rear of a hatchback. 

While this is obvious to anyone moving bees some of us don't have trucks. 

Let me be real clear, it takes around 1,400 bee stings to kill a person, each of those nuc boxes contain over 5,000 bees.
We have them covered in screens however all hell would break loose if we rolled the car. 
It'd be ugly. 

The safest way would be to drive with jacket on..or just use a truck.

Once we arrived home we let them sit for a half hour to relax.  They weren't too pleased with the drive but we kept the ac on and protected them from the sun.

I have a ventilated jacket as well as a full suit.  The full suit is pretty cool for dealing with unknown bees.  When I installed my first nucs I was fully protected with gloves and all. 
This is an unnecessary level of protection as I soon found out.

I really like my hive frame holder which keeps removed frames clean and safe while I'm working.

I installed the hives onto concrete blocks, inserted the five frames into the middle of my 8 frame deep hive bodies and moved onto the next nuc.

It is really fascinating watching the bees.  I spent some time looking at the frames and was able to identify drone and worker brood cells.  I have a ton to learn as I didn't find the queen...I'll keep looking!