Checking on Brood and Swarm Removal

I like opening the little Top Bar Nuc (TBN) first, they were angrier the first two times I checked on them and it's easier for me to do the angry ones first (even though they are fine now). 

Second-to-most-recent bar of comb the girls have built. You can see a bunch of pollen and some nectar in the top 1/5th of the comb. The rest is filled mostly with unhatched eggs and recently hatched larvae.

This is a frame of almost completely worker brood, there is an odd cell of nectar in there, but I think the bees with use that up and the queen will go back and lay in empty frames when they emerge. Or maybe they will fill in the whole shebang with stores when the bees emerge.

This comb has a large quantity of capped drone brood and quite a bit of nectar. I haven't seen any capped honey yet, but I think they aren't far off.   

I think this is the same bar, but shows with a little more detail the emerged cells, capped drone cells, and open nectar.

Last one is an action shot of Sarah and I catching a swarm out in West Philly. Boy was that exciting. The very next thing I build is going to be a bee vacuum, which would have made this an hour long catch-drive-hive operation instead of the all evening, shake-sting-curse-drive-sting-curse-tarp-pray cluster (pun intended) it turned out to bee.

 

Top Bar Hive, Top Bar Nuc and Installing a Few Thousand Bees

This is what a new beekeeper picking up two packages of bees looks like, those two crates are the packages, 3 lbs or workers, a queen and some sugar in a box. What a party.

Here are the one and a half hives I've built, the one in the background is a four foot top bar hive, in the foreground a top bar nuc. It saved me from having to build a whole second top bar hive in the short period I had before the bees arrived. I've got to get the second done soon, or make another nuc for a split. 

Two starter bars to get them building comb straight, hopefully.

Spray bottle with very light honey syrup, and my first package. What an exciting thing, installing the bees.

Pulling out the staples for the lid and queen cage. This is so the can of syrup can be removed, then the queen cage. Then it's time to...

Shake and dump 3 pounds of bees into their new home and hang the queen from one of the bars.

After reading Michael Bush's The Practical Beekeeper I'd pretty much decided I didn't want to feed them sugar syrup of any kind, dry sugar if I had to. This is organic honey I've been collecting from residue inside buckets that get thrown away. The girls loved it. They are doing well, the queens are out and laying, and all the workers are busy building and collecting. Next post will have some shots of the bees and comb.