A warm afternoon, so Adrian and I plotted to go through the hives up at Mt. Evelyn after work.
He'd checked them quickly the day before, and the "utter hive" had been getting full, so it was time to add another box on top, and check the 2 other hives he had in his back yard....
Smokin'...
First, The "utter hive"
The boxes themselves are from when his folks used to keep bees years ago. Repainted, re-framed.
Adrian had cleared off a whole lot of burr comb the day before, but they had already started building it up again. No hive mat in this one yet.
Check out the red propolis, very different colour to the other hives.
A couple of small swarm cells, scraped them off.
This is the "tree hive", the bees we got with help from Dale about a year ago. (refer blog 2010-01-16)
Some random comb in a couple of the frames, this is because the wild comb was basically pushed onto the wire when we collected it, so it wasn't the beautiful straight flat comb that you get from using foundation. This wreaks havoc with surrounding frames, too, all sorts of random shapes hanging off...
More weird comb on this frame
One of the "tree hive" frames.
good brood pattern, but we didn't see much pollen...
These bees seem to be lazy ,they haven't expanded much at all in the last 9 months or so, always the same.
it has been re-queened, so what's their problem?
The third hive, known as "the other one"
This one is the swarm from the Bee wrangler, hived 2010-11-08, but already filling up the box. A couple of empty frames, and very docile bees.
A bit sparse compared to the others.
The burr comb we scraped out of the 'utter hive', and propolis from the same on the left.
The big brown ball of propolis is from the tree hive.
Why so different?
And what do you do with it? We need a leaky boat, this stuff will stick to anything.
The location, view from Adrian's back deck.
'tree hive' and 'Utter hive' (now a double) on the right.
The 'other one', in the duck run.
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