All three colonies have seemed frantically busy this week so I had a check inside to make sure that there was still plenty of room for all this nectar they're bringing in.
Beatrix first. This colony has now rapidly become the strongest of the lot, far more so than either of the other two.
I was surprised that this shallow frame, which has been in the brood chamber for a few weeks now, has still not been built up with drone cell comb, like it was last time I checked it. There seems to be very little wax-building being done in this colony at all, but they are incredibly busy at foraging and there is still plenty of room for the queen to continue laying.
We found the queen quite easily, even without her spot (Beatrix was marked green twice last year and both times the spot disappeared by the next inspection, so we gave up trying. There are still some tiny flecks of green left so we can tell it is still her and not a replacement!) and the health of this colony seems great, though there is already not much room left in the supers.
I added a new super directly over the brood box [This is known as 'bottom supering' - adding the empty super at the top of the stack is called 'top supering']. Many beekeepers have different opinions about which technique is better and my reasoning for using bottom supering is that there is very obviously a much shorter distance for the bees to have to lift the stores. Raising several kilos of nectar those extra few feet to the top of the stack would be a mammoth task for them, so having the space for stores as close to the front door as possible seems to me to be the most sensible thing to do. As I said, opinions are divided on this and I'm sure many would disagree with me.
I also swapped a couple of the supers over so that this pattern is continued throughout the stack, as shown. This does mean a job of heavy lifting for me, just to check how much space they have in the empty super, but it saves them having to lift extra weight themselves!
It seemed less busy in Charlie's colony and they have only slowly built up their stores. There seems no obvious reason for it but it seemed a far less productive colony, though the health was still good.
I was expecting more from Dipsy's colony - this one has previously been the strongest of the three. However there was not a great deal extra in the supers, easily room for another week or so.
I checked in the brood box to make sure that there wasn't a problem here and found this:
This explains a lot - there were almost three frames each side of the brood nest entirely full of sealed honey on each side. This is known as being 'honey bound'. This means that, because of the stores down below, the queen has far less space to lay eggs. I need these bees to move these stores up into the supers so that Dipsy can get on and lay more.
I scratched the surface of the entire comb, damaging all the cappings. This should encourage them to remove it from these frames and take it all up above.
It was surprising that this frame right next to it has such lighter honey than the other one. There can only be a few weeks' difference between the harvest of each nectar source but the colour of honey seems entirely different!
This shows what an advantage having a marked queen is - she's clearly visible, even from this distance (click on the photo for a larger view).
The health in here seemed great as well. Dipsy was laying well but has only been able to use the central five frames, the rest being full of honey. Hopefully now she'll be able to get back on with her job without interruption.
