Relief at Blue Heron

While I was waiting today to show Travis, a new beekeeper, how to inspect the beehive, I saw bees all over this aster that is blooming. Look at the pollen packed into her corbicula (pollen basket). This was the best picture of many I took.



I fed the Blue Heron hive 2 1/2 quarts of Ross Conrad's bee tea on Thursday afternoon. It's Saturday afternoon and all of it is gone! Travis and I reloaded the interior Boardman I was using with a new pint and we put a baggie filled with 3 quarts of tea onto the hive.

As we opened the hive, we clearly broke open some honeycomb. I love it when the bees efficiently circle the honey leak and all stick in their tongues to suck it up. Bees are really waste not, want not creatures! See how they completely circle the honey so as not to lose a single drop.



Here's Travis wearing my ill-fitting bee helmet looking at a beautiful comb of brood laid by this queen. In the bottom deep we saw several frames - actually almost all of the eight - with dark brood cappings - meaning it's not new - probably bees that are about to emerge. If this hive keeps putting away the syrup I am giving them, they may make it through the winter - fingers crossed, everyone!



Some of the frames are incompletely filled with comb as this one is. You can see the liquid in the cells. We saw lots of festooning bees in this box and hopefully they'll use the syrup to draw some wax to contain winter stores.



The hive was much heavier than on my last visit and I am well pleased with how it is growing.

The nights are much cooler now so I removed the ventilated hive cover and replaced it with a solid inner cover.  I will do that with the Rabun county hive next week when I'm up there.  I also plan to replace the cover of Topsy with a solid board like Sam Comfort uses.