Sweet!

Mistress of the Hive!

During the most recent peek into our  hive, we discovered that our bees have been quite busy filling 2 honey supers with, well, honey!   Wish I could say our excellent bee keeping skills had something to do with this, but really we were pretty hands-off and just let the bees do their thing.

After taking the covers off of the hive, and smoking down the bees, I used a hive tool to loosen the wax around the frames, so I could pull one out to inspect it.

This little frame was sooooo heavy!  I was a little worried I would suddenly lose my grip and cause some bees to become very upset.  Thankfully I'm stronger than I think!  The white part you see is where the bees have capped cells of honey. 

And here is the hive magically put back together so you can get an idea of its size. 

Fashion Fail

 The top three are the boxes from which we will harvest honey for our own use. There is a sort of screen between the deeps and the honey supers to prevent the queen from laying eggs where there should be clean honey only. The top super, as of 2 weeks ago, was empty so I'm not sure they will be able to get to that before fall.  

 The bottom 2 boxes are where the queen lays eggs and where the bees store honey for their own use in the winter.  These are the ones we started with in the spring.  This is what it looked like then:

Our next step will be to harvest honey and extract it from the comb. Probably this weekend or next. Hmmm...better re-read that chapter in Bee Keeping for Dummies....