First Inspection (Part 2)

First Inspection, alright! Before our inspection I had a bit of bee die off due to a problem with my feeder, not alright. I estimate losses at maybe 500-800 bees. Thankfully we should have started out with about 10,000. I’m (mostly) confident my bees will still be good. So L’s inspection didn’t go that well as you heard. Well it was good in the fact we saw brood and eggs and saw that her bees were generally working hard. Not good in the fact that she had to take out a while frames worth of comb and the bees got kind of pissed about it. My inspection had an auspicious start. After L’s ended it rained for a bit, maybe 15 minutes. I wouldn’t start while it was raining. Thankfully it was a passing shower so I could go ahead after it cleared out. I smoked the bees as I should have, both at the hive entrance and at the hive top when I was taking the cover off. I gave them a minute or two after smoking to let it work. When I took the feeder off (which is the ‘top’ for now) the bees were just going about their business. I smoked them a bit more and they went lower into their hive just how they should. Hooray bees!!! I took the frames out one by one checking their progress. They had comb drawn on maybe 4 to 5 frames and I could see lots of eggs. There was very little burr comb, even around the empty queen cage. I scraped it off pretty easily. They had a good amount of ‘honey’ stored on a couple frames, I had to scrape some burr comb off one frame and some honey came with it … it was delicious (although sill clear as it is really only the 1:1 sugar syrup we gave them, not much pollen for color). During my frame by frame inspection I even saw her highness the queen. Slightly bigger than the rest, but with a large white spot on her back (we have ‘marked’ queens). I think it’d be hard to spot her without a mark … I’m glad that’s standard practice these days. After finishing my relatively brief inspection I closed them up and that was it. See, anyone can be a beekeeper!! Even if you’re still afraid of bees … because the veil helps a lot! During inspections we always have our veils on and an epi-pen with us just in case.