Today I took an early morning trip to the farm and along with other tasks I fed and checked on the bees. The bee feeders were empty, but Dad had only filled them with a quart each on Friday evening. I mixed up my 1:1 sugar solution and added a quart to each as well. I would have added more, but I am out of sugar; if my tally is right they have gone through 32 pounds of sugar!
While I was out at the hives I decided to check on their progress in the second deep supers, and after Dad's experience I decided to suit up! I checked the East hive first and NOT to my surprise I found more comb being built between the frames. I can't figure this out, because the frames are set at the correct distance. I separated the frames to get a better look and there was a piece of comb loosely attached to the one of the frames that fell to the bottom of the box when I moved the frames. I removed a couple of frames so I could retrieve the comb and found it to be mostly round and about 6 inches across! They had not filled the bulk of it with anything, but one part did have brood larva that looked like it was about to be capped for the pupa state of development. I scraped of the excess wax from the frames and cleaned them up the best I could. I felt bad about the brood, but they need to learn how to build comb only on the man-made frames...yes, I'm lecturing nature! ;-)
I looked into the West hive and was very pleasantly surprised that they had two frames in the second deep super over 90% filled with capped brood on both sides! They should be coming out as bees in the next week!!!
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