Tag Archives: inspection

Concord Hive Catching Up

Last week we talked about how our Concord hive has been lagging behind the progress of the Lexington hive. It was at the point where we were concerned that we may have to put the feeder back in the hive to help them build up wax comb.

We are happy to report that Concord hive looks to be on its way to recovery! We had a really good week for bees with sunshine and heat everyday. Concord must have had a lot of new bees hatch as well. Take a look at these before and after photos. The first was last week when we were concerned, it was taken in the evening when most of the bees should have been back in the hive.

Concord Hive - 1 Week Ago - Very Weak

Compare that to the photo taken today in the middle of the day when its more likely for the bees to be out and about! They’re a lot more bees and the comb is built all the way across on several bars, and they even have a new bar they are starting wax on in the front!

Concord Today

It looks like Concord hive is back on track so we will be leaving it alone for another week or two before doing another full inspection. Since it looks so good we did not put in the feeder like we thought we might have to last week either.

That’s all, just wanted to let everyone know that there’s nothing to worry about with our Concord hive!

You can see more pictures from this latest inspection on our Facebook Page.


Full Hive Inspection Video

It finally happened, we are totally caught up on our beekeeping progress with our website!

Today we did an inspection on both hives and instead of snapping a bunch of photos we decided to make a video of the experience.

We’ve split the video into two parts, the first of our Lexington hive, and the second our Concord hive. The Lexington hive is looking very strong with lots of comb filled with capped brood, larva, eggs, nectar, pollen, and even some honey! Our Concord hive is the weaker of the two but still relatively well off with a decent amount of capped brood, larva, eggs, nectar, pollen, and some honey.

Please enjoy these videos as we do talk a lot more in the video about the inspection process and more about the details of our two hives. We’d love to know what you think of our hive inspection and if you have any questions feel free to post them here!

 


The First Three Weeks

Its now been about three weeks since we first installed our bees and I wanted to share with you how they are doing. We were a little apprehensive after first getting them installed because we went on vacation for a week three days after installing them and worried something might happen while we were gone and we’d lose our hives. As you’ll see, the bees made it through the week we were on vacation despite our absence!

The day after installing them I was very excited to see how they were doing. Before going into work I went out back and took this video of them. This was about 7:30am yet they were out early flying around getting oriented. One even flew over to say good morning, landing on my hand while I was recording the video. It was a great feeling seeing them there after the first night and not all flying away (I had lots of worries after reading about all the things that can go wrong when introducing a new package of bees into a hive).

Bees On Syrup Feeder

Prior to leaving for vacation we did a mini-inspection of the hives. The first thing we looked for was how they were doing with the syrup. Since we’d be gone for a week we wanted to see how fast they were drinking the syrup to determine if they had enough to last the week we were gone. You can see from the picture that they were all over the feeder but after two days it looked like they’d be fine for another seven with the remaining syrup.

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