I went in today to add the screened bottom board with sticky paper to see what the mite count is like. I wanted to get some powdered sugar in there as I could see that the girls were cleaning themselves off on the entrance board, and I also wanted to see how they were doing with the super. AND I didn't have my husband's usual help as he was busy all day.
So I got everything ready, suited up, got my weather cover off by hand, lit the smoker, and went in. It was relatively simple to just get the boxes off, moved onto surfaces that could catch a queen if she happened to drop, and I found drones everywhere. Tis the seasons for the boys to get out, I suppose, but they were so big and I haven't been good at spotting the queen and I was just wondering if any of them were her, especially once I got down to the bottom board, had all the workers who were trying to come in backed up and buzzing me, and one of the drones took off from the bottom board and dropped into one of my basement window wells. Agh.
Anyway... I also had problems remembering how everything went with the bottom board and the screened board. One of those utterly newbie mistakes where I just forgot how the damned thing went together, and spent five minutes trying to keep bees off all the pieces and puzzle-solve it while all the bees were gathering in a bigger and bigger cloud.
Of course I also found three huge larva, naked, between the bottom brood box and the top brood box. At first, I panicked, thinking that they were exposed queen larvae... and that the hive is thinking about swarming! Eeek... but they were all in a bunch and there wasn't protective walls around them. I suspect that they were actually just more drones.
They were also going through the queen excluder to the supers and building comb in the super I'd placed a month ago. The top brood chamber isn't completely full, either, and I started to do a frame by frame inspection of the top box, but one of the old frames fell apart on me, the bottom bar just pulled free, with the nail right through it. I'm probably going to have to wire that one back together again eventually.
I think I was a little unnerved by just how MANY bees there are this spring compared even to last summer. There are just so many more of them!
I finally just decided to put everything back together, with the extra ventilation shims at the top of the hive, and the extra height bars for the front entrance, so that they have a bigger landing pad. It's hard to balance those things with gloved hands, but it was pretty clear that they were trying pretty hard to sting me when I found one of the girls hanging by her stinger in my deerskin glove. She didn't get through, though, so I'm going to have to go get my bee venom shot in a week or two. *laughs*
My goals were to just give the whole hive more ventilation and put the screened board in, and do a powdered sugar sprinkle. I got the powdered sugar into the brood boxes and we'll see how that goes in a few days. They clean the sugar off themselves and in the process clean off the Varroa mites. I haven't seen evidence of any other problems, yet, and I'm hoping that that'll be enough for this summer at least.
I did what I intended, but the possibility of the colony actually swarming really threw me. I wasn't expecting that, and I know that a second year queen is always stronger than the first year she starts to lay. I had added the super to make sure they had room, and they haven't actually filled all of the top brood box yet, either, so... there may actually be plenty of space. It's all such a puzzle, and I need to keep ahead of them to accommodate their needs. I'd rather not split them unless I have to... which probably means I need to really go in and do another frame-by-frame check to see if there are queen cells anywhere.
Probably in the next day or two. Sadly, since John wasn't here, I wasn't able to get any pictures of anything, and it would have been really useful to have pictures of the broken open larvae for ID purposes from experienced keepers.
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