First Inspection (Part 1)

It was a dark and stormy morning. At some point after lunch on Saturday, April 16th, I realized it was perfect weather to fool around working in the private drive. When it rains, the waters’ course is most visible, and it is most easy to divert it; the gravel and mud in the road is softened, and the water itself will help you carve out a new path if you give it minimal direction. It’s really quite fun to just watch it. My weapons of choice, as usual, were a pick, a shovel, and a garden rake. Working in the rain keeps one at a reasonable temperature, so I was quite comfortable despite being soaking wet. I managed to move some gravel and debris out of a section of the gutter, so that water was running in it again, and not in the road; then at some point N came down to see my progress, and said the weather was supposed to break in the late afternoon, which was good news. As we had been watching the weather for the weekend, we knew that it was supposed to rain all day on Saturday and be cold and windy on Sunday, and we knew we had to check our hives. So, I went back up to the house for a shower, because you shouldn’t show up to a beehive covered in mud and filth and sweat. Unfortunately, bees don’t like you to smell too good either, so my scented shampoo, soap, and lotion probably didn’t help all that much in the end, but it made me feel much better about myself.

So here’s the fun part. We put the bees in a week and a half ago, right? So this is the inspection where we’re supposed to open them up, make sure they’ve released the queen, look for eggs and larvae, remove the queen cage and burr comb, that kinda stuff. Well, were we in for a surprise. We managed to get the smoker lit, and set out with our equipment to the hives. “Whose do you want to check first?” I asked N. “Let’s check yours first,” he said, with a smirk. I would say it was a smile, but deep down I knew it was a smirk. I blew a few puffs of smoke at the entrance with the smoker and waited a few moments. Then I positioned myself behind the hive and took the outer cover off, which was a little sticky because the painted parts like to stick together for some reason, which I find extremely irritating. I’m supposed to be battling propolis, not sticky paint. I blew a few more puffs of smoke in and carefully removed the super that was around the hive-top feeder. Then I shimmied the hive top feeder across the bottom box towards me about a centimeter and got my fingertips under it, preparing to slide it off or lift it up, whichever ended up working out. I lifted, and it was heavy. Very heavy. I realize it was full of sugar syrup, but this just seemed odd to me. It was like something was stuck to it. Did the bees put propolis under it? Is it stuck to a frame with burr comb?

At this point of course, there were tons of bees just milling about, being loud and irritated because I was disturbing them and the weather was just barely nice enough for me to be doing so. We had, after all, gone out to check them umbrella in hand, just in case the break in the weather turned out not to be as clear as it was on the radar screen. There were still droplets coming down here and there. I think at this point, one of them stung my finger, and I quickly scraped the stinger off. Then I made N go get me a bag of ice, which he did graciously. What a nice guy. I proceeded to lift up the edge of the feeder, but it still seemed really heavy. “Hey, could you get down there and tell me what’s stuck in there?” I asked N. He knelt down, and I lifted the feeder again. “Oh...omg”, (or some paraphrase thereof) he said with alarm. I set the feeder back down. The agitated bees continued hovering and crawling and flying in small circles in the general area of my personal space. I gave them a little more smoke, which had no noticeable effect. “You have a huge piece of burr comb stuck to the bottom of your feeder.”

So that’s also a paraphrase, but you get the idea. So this is what happened. Normally, when you install bees, you are supposed to fit the queen cage inbetween two frames with minimal space left. Then the bees start to draw comb on the foundation in the frames, with some aberrant “burr comb” built around the contour of the queen cage pressed up against the foundation of the two middle frames. This comb then needs to be removed during your first installation, along with the queen cage, so that the bees can finish drawing out uniform comb on these frames.

In the chaos of our bee installation (which wasn’t really that bad, it was just new and clumsy) I didn’t get the queen cage positioned exactly right between the two middle frames. And, well...the bees noticed. Apparently I had left about enough width of empty space to fit almost a whole frame in there, and in fact what the bees had done was to fill the entire space with a frame’s worth of burr comb.

N and I looked at each other. “You just gotta do it, man,” he said. We took a minute to collect ourselves, and then I had him hold the feeder up a few inches (which I’m sure he was less than thrilled about) while I slowly slid my hive tool between the top of the comb and the bottom of the feeder. It came off and dropped gently back into the box. so I finally had the feeder out, at this point, and we set it down and covered it, to discourage feeding while it was open.

You might think this is the end of the story, but it’s not. I still had a frame of comb that I had to remove, plus some lumpy comb on the bordering frames, plus some extra burr comb in the general area, just for fun. And the bees were less than thrilled with me, probably because this was taking so long and the weather had them in a bad mood. “Could you please get me two pairs of tongs from the kitchen?” I asked N. He acquiesced, and I slowly opened and slid them down around the comb and pulled it up. As you might imagine, the bees were thick all over it, going about their business of tending to eggs and larvae with lovely arcs of sugar syrup and pollen packed into the top cells. All this stuff, including the bees that were clinging to it, is what had made the feeder so heavy. It was really a shame. I managed to brush some of the bees off into the hive, but many i had to brush into the grass in front of the hive, and nudge some of them toward the front opening.

I don’t remember much after that. I tried to slide the rest of the frames together as much as I could, but the irregular combs in the middle made me nervous. What if i pushed them too tightly together and my queen was trapped? What if a lot of bees were stuck and couldn’t keep the brood warm in the time it took them to free themselves? Alas, I would have to wait an entire week to see how things turned out. I put the feeder back on and closed her up. I could finally take a breath; after all, my turn was over. I may or may not have smiled—ok, smirked—at N. He caught my glance and smiled back. “Yeah, because that makes me want to do nothing more than check my bees right now,” he said, and chuckled to himself.