Festooning Bees in New Hives

Today is Sunday and I installed the two nucs into hives on Tuesday afternoon. They've been working for about five full days, but I wanted to see how they were doing since it's easiest for me to inspect on the weekend.

Mellona had built out the starter strip frames just a short way. When I removed the frame below from the hive, the bees were festooning but moved too quickly for us to get a picture (my daughter Valerie was around today and took pictures of the inspection).


















Although the bees in Mellona hadn't built out the wax very far, the bees in Proteus have been very industrious. We caught them festooning as they were building out the frames next to the ones from the nuc. The wax cells look smaller than the ones in Mellona, but I didn't measure. The bees hanging off of each other in a downward line are "festooning" as they make the wax cells.

















Here is a comb from Proteus that has almost been built all the way to the bottom of the frame. The bees here are building smaller cells than in Mellona.


















Here is a bee-covered frame from the nuc that established Proteus. Under all of those bees is a great brood pattern. I have a good feeling about this hive - it is extremely active and a little aggressive, but is enthusiastic, and I always appreciate energy put into a task, as these bees have with creating comb.