Today the weather was a nice 78*F, with light winds and mostly sunny skies.

I've been dying to take a peek inside the white and multi-colored hives(I'm going to have to come up with a better name for this hive) and see what the girls are up to.

For the past week we've seen the white hive have lots and lots of flight traffic coming in and out of the hive, while the other had only moderate flight traffic.

When we installed the nucs into the hives, we were able to see both queens, and a good amount of capped brood and circular larva in the cells. Although, I'll admit, at the time I was too nervous to get them installed and forgot to look for eggs.

Today was a much calmer day, and I wanted to make sure I saw eggs in all cells, since when we installed them, we saw queen cells on a couple of the frames, of both nucs.



I also wanted to switch the entrance reducers around, since they've been taking a number to enter the hives on the smallest setting. See how it's got a yellowish coloring on the inside of the reducer?

Opening the white hive first, I discovered they had taken less than 20% of the baggie feeder I gave them. However, almost every frame in the hive had a good amount of uncapped liquid, I assume is nectar since they weren't taking the sugar syrup.

I was not able to spot the queen in this box, but I did spot several cells with eggs in them. I know she's been there in the past 3 days. And there were no queen cells that I could see.

They had not begun to draw out the frames of foundation I provided them yet, so I moved one frame in towards the center of the box, so that it was on the edge of the brood pattern, but within the other frames the bees were working on.

For directions on how to rotate the frames within the set of frames provided by the nuc, see Grant Gillard's "What to Expect The First Year" presentation, starting on page 31. In his presentation, the purple frames are the ones that came with the nuc, and the non-colored frames are plain foundation.

I decided to leave the baggie feeder on the hive since they are predicting rain in the next couple of days, and the girls might go up and take advantage of it.

The multi-colored hive uses quart jar inverted feeders. I have three of them in there, none of which was drawn from much at all. In comparison, the hives at my dad's house are drinking the syrup like there's no tomorrow! Although, his house is in a more wooded area, and I wonder if the girls are using his syrup while waiting for the rest of the floral sources to open?

Anyway, I opened up this hive, the one we haven't seen much flight traffic from, to find they're going to town in there! They've started to draw out 2 of the foundation frames already. The frames they came with from the nuc are very full with liquid/nectar and they've started to draw out the foundation to give themselves room to expand.

On this  hive I took two frames of foundation and mixed them into the already-drawn-out frames.

Both hives seem like they will be ready for a second deep within another week.

With a larger reducer in place, no waiting!


And you can see them bringing in pollen packed in their baskets!