With so many jobs to do and a toddler's party to rush back to there was no way we'd get everything on the list done today. We just made sure that anything that involved actually opening up the hive was finished because it will soon be too cold, even on a sunny day like this, to do that.Everything took a lot longer than normal today because of the huge quantity of both honey and bees. This is great for the health of the colony but it makes the inspection more tricky - thousands of bees defending their precious honey stores makes handling the heavy frames slow work!
They seem fairly used to us by now and are very placid most of the time, so long as they don't get squished by accident. It only takes one damaged bee to send out a distress scent and a placid colony can suddenly become very protective. This is the main reason for having the smoker handy at all times as one quick puff around the squashed bee masks this distress signal and the others don't react to it. We find we don't need to use the smoker much because we have time to move slowly and carefully, gently moving the bees out of the way as much as possible, but it's always at hand, just in case.
As expected, every frame in the super is completely full on both sides with capped honey. Just ideal stores to see them through even the harshest winter East Anglia is likely to get!
As I lifted off the super with all the full frames in some cells of brace comb broke off and spilled honey onto the frames of the brood box - some bees immediately formed a circle around the spillage and licked it all up - a drop of this stuff is far too precious for them to waste. It really makes me appreciate the value of a teaspoon of honey!
Checking the frames in the brood box took a long time, mostly because we were trying hard not to crush any bees as we went. Removing the first frame is the hardest as it's wedged in tight as well as being sealed down with propolis. First you have to lever up one end with the hive tool then hold it in place as you lever the other end loose.
Taking care not to nip any bees with your fingers you lift the frame directly up, trying not to roll any bees off against the side. Of course the queen could be on any one of these frames now and with this many thousands of bees all over the place it's practically impossible to spot her.
Having said that, my wife did catch a glimpse of her as I was holding a frame up but she'd disappeared into the mass of workers by the time I turned it round - even that is a slow process with so many bees all over my fingers!
We found that all was exactly as we could hope for in the brood box - plenty more food stores and a healthy pattern off eggs and larvae too.Unfortunately there are still varroa mites appearing on my varroa floor, even after the recent treatment. There aren't many, only 6 in a week - which is a minuscule percentage when you consider how many thousands of bees there are here now. There's nothing I can do about them at this time of year anyway - we'll be going to see a local demonstration regarding a winter chemical treatment against varroa, called 'trickling oxalic acid' but we're trying to avoid chemical treatments as much as possible - I've got some alternative and non-chemical ideas to try out in the spring, all being well!
These frames in the super are now full of sealed honey, with the white cappings on for winter storage. Sugar syrup alone would not store well for long (it begins to ferment and makes the bees sick) but now that the bees have processed it into honey and sealed it away it will store perfectly well for several months if required.
You can see how thick the honeycomb is now. With this much on each side of the frame they're fairly heavy to lift. Of course I had to lift the whole full super off the brood box to be able to check that - normally I can do it very gently but it must have weighed about 20kg today. I just hefted it down hoping any bees would have the sense to get out of the way quickly!
I stand the full super on top of the upturned roof like this. This means that there won't be many bees lost on the ground as I carry on checking the brood box.
There is loads of capped honey stored in here too - the side of the frame you can still see in the box here is completely full of it. The one being held up still has brood developing in the very centre, as do all eight central frames, but the priority for the colony now is to store food like crazy, not to raise new mouths to feed!
This is the ideal state to leave the hive in for the winter. I hope to do one last check through next weekend, if the weather's warm enough, then it'll be time to shut it all up for the winter and hope for the best.
They've taken an amazing amount of sugar syrup this week - I've had to make up a new batch every single day! That's 2kg of sugar plus 1 litre of water each time.
They've had 12kg of sugar in 6 days with no sign of slowing down! Things are looking pretty hopeful for the winter after all!
I think these dragonflies were tricked by the metal roof looking like a pool of water from the sky. Great to see them so close and still for once - they're usually just flashes of colour in the sky round here.
As you can see here, their larder is completely bare. They've only just begun to build up the wax foundation in the super - in fact they're in virtually the same state they were in a month ago! By now these frames should be full of honey - there's no way this colony would survive even the mildest winter in this state.
The brood box shown above is a different story - masses of bees and plenty of honey to feed the hatching brood. There just isn't much in the way of provisions to keep the adult population alive for very long.
It was interesting to see the bees' reaction here when a wasp invaded to try to pinch some honey. They didn't sting it as I would have expected but four or five of them just bundled on top of it and wrestled it out of the hive. It came back less than a minute later but it got the message when it was booted out the next time - we didn't see it again.
Seeing as the only problem facing this colony now (so far as we can tell) is a shortage of food, we just need to feed them plenty of sugar syrup over the next few weeks and hope that they can convert it into honey to store for the winter. The autumn sugar syrup solution is much more concentrated than the spring syrup - I use 2kg of sugar to 1 litre of water (approx.)
The bees have emptied the tub of Thymol gel and spread it all around the hive. It doesn't smell of much to me, slightly like the liquid goop inside a cough drop. It seems to be doing the trick though - instead of finding 8 - 10 dead varroa mites each week there were well over 200 lying on the floor today!
It's a bit frustrating - a whole sheet they've only just begun to build on and one of them thought it would be a good idea to plonk a big old queen cup in the middle. These are often called 'play cups', and considered to be a bit like practise for making a real queen cell.
This picture above shows something interesting the bees do during every inspection. Those bees on the front porch with their bottoms in the air are also fanning their wings furiously but standing still. They are sending out a scented homing signal to any bees which may have been left outside the hive during the inspection. The house bees are not experienced fliers yet so can easily get lost if only a few feet from the hive so with all these bees on the front entrance sending out a strong pheromone signal there's a good chance that any stray bees could easily find their way back again. This system also works in an apiary with many hives because every colony has their own scent, as unique to them as a fingerprint!
Anyway, it just so happened that there were a number of unusual things to see today so it all took a while. There are two new things to see on this frame:
The first thing is easy to spot - a queen cup - in the top right:
I hope this isn't anything to be concerned about. The bees make this super-sized cell to grow a new queen. This means that either they want to swarm (the current queen leaves with half the bees and half the honey, leaving the remaining bees to grow a new queen) or they're not pleased with their current queen and want to raise a new one to kill the old one. The queen doesn't lay a special queen egg - the worker bees will just take a regular egg from another cell and grow it into a queen by feeding it nothing but royal jelly. This super high-protein diet means the difference between growing up to be a regular female bee with a six-week lifespan and being a queen bee, living for over four years! Anyway, whatever their motives are, it's too late in the season to allow this to happen so I cut off both the queen cups I saw today.
This guy is huge! He dwarfs all the female bees, even the queen would look a bit weedy next to him! He has these vast oversized eyes and huge wings because he has only one job in life - to spot a virgin queen bee about 50 feet up in the air, catch her, mate with her, then fall back to earth dead!
Unfortunately this treatment can only affect the exposed Varroa mites - any inside the sealed cells still are completely unharmed. This is why the treatment has to be on for a number of weeks, so that all the mites still unhatched have time to emerge and then be killed by the fumes. I put the pack on then closed up the hive, reducing the entrance hole to its smallest setting. After a fortnight we'll repeat the whole process and then (in theory, at least) every single Varroa mite will have hatched out and been done in by the Thymol before it has a chance to lay any more eggs.
That straight line of empty cells in the middle looks suspiciously like the damage some nasty tunnelling grub (a wax moth larva) would cause. These pests are everywhere that honeybees exist but shouldn't normally be a problem right in the middle of a strong colony during their busiest season - the army of house bees here would normally turf any unwelcome visitors out straight away. This level of damage would be a sign that the colony is not able to keep up its housekeeping duties.
It means the queen had a look inside and decided it wasn't suitable to lay an egg in - big relief!
There was yet more propolis all over everything today. We had a good attmpt at scraping as much gunk off as possible but I'm pretty sure we'll find it all back again next time!
As you can see, she is quite grey and fluffy. This disappears very quickly and will get rubbed off in a few minutes.
They haven't made much progress with building wax in the super yet - we found they'd only just begun on this one frame so far.
A brood frame like this with masses of sealed honey is incredibly heavy and awkward to lift and rotate freely to check both sides. This much weight can also cause the whole honeycomb to drop straight out of the frame if the wax gets too warm - one of the house bees' main jobs on hot days like this is to try to cool everything down!
These 'before and after' pictures show how they tried to glue the queen excluder into place.
We found Amidala quite easily again today (although she only has a tiny speck of her red blob left!). She is visible in this next picture - in the top right, about a third of the way down.
Looking at these pictures it seems hard to imagine there being more bees required but this is still not a full hive!
We added a second box to the hive this morning. It's not as deep as the brood box and is known as a 'super' {from the Latin, meaning 'above'}. These shallower frames are used only for storing food, not eggs, so it's going to be much easier for us to judge exactly what supplies they have in stock.
We put a queen excluder between the brood box and the super. This is a large metal sheet with holes all over it. These holes are precisely large enough for the worker bees to pass through but too narrow for the queen. This has to be in place before supers are placed on otherwise she'd get up there and lay eggs in there too!
I don't think they'll need it for much longer - you can see in this picture that they've built up the wax all the way up to the end frame now.
The photo of this last frame shows clearly what the wax-building process is. Practically all of this frame is just the thin sheet of pure beeswax which I fixed in there originally (there is a hexagonal pattern pre-stamped on it to encourage them to make uniform cells - they would do a pretty good job of this themselves but it wouldn't be quite so straight and regular). This original sheet is so thin that through it you can even see the shadows of bees which are on the opposite side.
It is becoming far more crowded in the hive and it's harder to see much other than thousands of bees scurrying around. Thankfully we've now had a few weeks learning from watching a small colony so we're getting better at spotting things quickly and even pushing the bees out of the way with our fingers if necessary!
Something very obvious on this frame is that large raised cell in the centre of all those other empty ones. This one is a drone cell - a male bee. Because these cells are larger than those of the females they are easy to spot as they stick out quite a bit higher. Also, they take a few days longer to hatch which explains why this one is still there when all his sisters around him have climbed out and started work already! (There's one in the centre left, just sticking her head out for the first time).
Something else we spotted straight away is that Amidala has managed to remove her red spot! She's clearly visible on the photo above (you'll know the queen bee when you see her - she has a huge dark abdomen). It could be that my paint blob hadn't dried enough last time so we decided to try again. 
Of course it could be that the authentic 'bee-paint' I'm using is just so non-toxic that it's just licked stright off by the bees - it does look and smell just like the kids' poster paint (but in a tiny nail varnish style pot and about a thousand times more expensive!)