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Sunday, November 9, 2014

Quick hive inspection

I inspected the hive, quickly, to see if there was enough honey for winter and to try to do a consolidation since it's supposed to freeze next week.  I haven't done one since I flipped it over, but I was glad to see that the bees had all moved down to the bottom box.  I didn't take a full count, Maybe half the frames have brood, and it's not really consistent.  So I couldn't think of a way to really consolidate them.  One frame had nothing but 3 dead bees.  The bottom box had one frame of honey.  The top box had about half the frames in use, with 3 heavy, but still not fully capped.  (And now that I think about it, that means that I flipped the boxes back over to get the brood on bottom and forgot about it, or the top would be at least all drawn out.)  I moved them all to one side, since I think the fullest brood frames were on that side.  (The hive has always been centered closer to the feeder than the actual center of the box).  I'm going to make another jar of syrup later, so they can have a couple of days of quick availability if they want to gather it.

I only have the one hive, so I don't have anything to really compare to to determine if the hive is right or not.  I went through it too quickly to look for the queen, and didn't have the camera on to search the pictures later.  I saw capped brood, and one (but just one) uncapped larvae.  I didn't see eggs, but I didn't really remember to specifically look for them either.  The hive is supposed to shut down to an extent during fall to prepare for winter, but I don't know to what extent.  We'll see how they do, I suppose.

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