We'll get to the question addressed by the title of the post in just a second. I need to first fill you in on the rest of the inspection from today.

It was roughly 101*F and humid, and yesterday was the first day in over two weeks that we've had any rain.

The all white color hive seems to have picked up in population which is good. I'm not sure how since the brood pattern still isn't larger than a few frames. I think this hive is definitely candidate for a new queen in the spring. They were starting to pack in some nectar in their top brood box, but still had 2 frames that were less than 40% drawn. They'll need fall 2:1 syrup I'm guessing.

Today was the first inspection since I removed the super from the blue/purple hive and extracted and bottled the honey last weekend.

When we finished last week, I put the 'wet' super back onto the hive, above the inner cover allowing the bees to finish removing the tiny drops of honey that wouldn't spin out, and to repair the comb. When I checked them today, they had done a great job of drying the comb, and repairing the rough jagged edges!

When I pulled a few frames, and held them up to the sunlight, I was surprised to see they had started filling them again.

When I inspected the two brood boxes below I found almost all the frames in the top brood box to be 80-90% capped honey and several frames in the lower brood box were packed with nectar.

The queen was present and laying, but I'd imagine she's starting to feel cramped for space. Once I saw how packed they were in the lower brood boxes, it was no surprise they're already starting to fill the super again. I suppose I'll leave it on there a few more weeks and see what happens.

OK, onto the tiny creatures I saw.



On the outside of the bottom brood box, on the blue/purple hive were these tiny light brown, almost clear looking bugs. When I removed the super and top brood box and dug down to the bottom brood box, I saw these bugs crawling on the tops of the frames.

You can see them fairly well on the white plastic frame above, with a closer image below.



To me they look like they have only (2) body segments, and I think I saw little legs or feet. They almost look like tiny newborn ants to me with the way they scurry around.

I tried to Google search, but since I don't have a very good description, I didn't get a lot of reliable results.

One interesting result was for Honeypot Ants. The article isn't very long, and doesn't sound like what I'm seeing, unless what I'm seeing is the very, very young stage of the ants.

Anyone else seem these little guys before?