July 20 Inspection

Colony #1

Here is a picture of some larvae in the first colony.  We didn't see the queen but we did see brood, larvae and eggs.  The larvae are the "C" shaped ones in the cell.  The eggs look like little pieces of rice.  You can also see 1st instar larvae in this picture.  These are the ones you would graft if you were going to try to raise your own queens.  They are the really small larvae that are slightly "C" shaped.

Larvae  and eggs.

Once I saw the eggs I decided to close up the colony because I know the queen is there.  This is good because this was the new queen that dad got from the Queen Rearing class he took at the University of Minnesota.  She should be a good queen!

Colony 2
This colony isn't doing very good at all.  There is only one frame with bees on it.  There is a queen but there was very little eggs or larvae.  I don't think this hive is going to make it much longer.

Colony 3
They only have one deep but there is brood, eggs, and larvae.  We also saw the queen and they are doing better.

Colony 4
This colony is really doing well.  When I checked the supers I found eggs and capped brood.  That means that somehow the queen got up into the supers.  It wasn't a big deal but it did make for a lot of work.  I took off all four supers and stacked them up.  I didn't see the queen in them so I put the queen excluder on them and then started looking in the 3 deep boxes for eggs.   There was capped brood down in the 3 deep boxes but no eggs.  So we thought the queen must be somewhere in the 4 supers.  We finally found the queen in the second super.  I let her walk out onto one of the frames in the deep boxes and then we put the excluder back on top of the 3 deep boxes.  We put 2 queen excluders on just in case there was a problem with one of them.  I think the queen must have been on one of the excluders when we checked last time and then she moved to the other side of it or I flipped it.

Capped brood between 2 deeps

Checking to see how much honey has been capped yet.