A Saturday morning with the sun shining, no heat yet for the day, and no rain is a great time to peek in on the girls for a weekly inspection.
The big event this week was the discovery that ants had found their way into my top box where I keep my feeder for the colony. The feeder had been depleted in 3 days (instead of a week) and it was covered in those large black ants everyone loves to hate. I had read/learned about ants loving to find a hive of bees so I knew what I needed to do.
A quick raid of the wife’s seasonings and some liberal application of cinnamon as a barrier inside my feeder box and the ants were soon scurrying away.
I’ll leave this in place for a few weeks and see if the ants seek out other shores.
The other lessons this week were that of bee space. Bee space is the narrow gap between frames where the bees live. 3/8th of an inch is the best. I saw when I put the hive back together last week, I left one of the frames a little too far apart, and the bees had begun to close the gap.
the fix for this is for the beekeeper to rese the frames to the right distance, scrape off the extra comb, and leave it in the hive for the bees to reclaim for other efforts. Here’s a good article on how wax is created by the teenage bees in your colony. https://www.keepingbackyardbees.com/how-do-honeybees-make-comb/
After those 2 items, I was able to continue on and confirmed I had eggs and larva in various stages, which is exactly what you want to see.
As I close this entry out, the final goal of the day was to get an eye on the queen. The person I bought the Nuc from was very kind, and marked the queen for me with a big blue dot. that makes finding her for a new bee keeper much easier.
Let me know if you have any questions. This has been a fun adventure so far. I’m loving the learning and seeing the bees do their thing. Now off to the store to replace the wife’s cinnamon.
Neonpenguin 