Summer Solstice Moon
After visiting the bees with Ruth yesterday, I got on a couple of websites just to review this 
time of year. Discovered that the nectar flow will start in 10-15 days, a bit delayed by the cool spring, which is good news for us beekeepers because it means the hives have had a good length of time to build up a colony.
(the girls in the nursery–brown capped cells–and adding pollen–the cells with yellow deposits in them.)
This year I just have the one colony, but it has energy to burn. Bees flowing over the tops of the frames, building out frames of honey which I’ve harvested. This colony will almost certainly fill up the third hive box with honey and have plenty of work left over to produce honey in honey supers. Unusual, but not unheard of for a first year colony. In a normal year I would have to wait until next year to harvest honey after I divide this colony.
Went back to the hive boxes today to check on swarm cells which I didn’t do with Ruth yesterday. I tipped up the hive boxes, checked underneath and saw none of the long cells that mean a colony has decided it’s time to find a new place to live. Whew.
I did a reversal, putting the bottom hive box in the middle, the middle box on the bottom and the third hive box which I put on yesterday, back on top. In ten days or so I’ll put a queen excluder on the top box, then begin adding honey supers two at a time.
It may be that I hit a learning plateau back in the late winter, no doubt pushed by the thirty to fifty stings I got at the end of the harvest two years ago. I was ready to give it up, throw in the hive tool, hang up my bee suit. You know. Glad I didn’t. I’m having more fun with it this year than I ever have.
