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.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for submitting your comments.
Once reviewed they will be posted to the blog.