More Bees

  Hi everyone. Happy Thursday. This week we started off with some  beautiful low humidity weather, but now we are into the heat and oppressive humidity of summer. Oh boy. 

 I'll start today's post with another journal page for Matilde's Houses and Buildings challenge at Art Journal Journey.

   Here's a page I made in my Dina Wakely ledger journal. The writing in the background came in the journal.

   I inked the background with 2 shades of blue and also some yellow ink. Because this page is in the back end of this journal, it picked up some texture from previous pages which gave it an interesting look.

   I created the ground by adding some ticket printed tape, some flower printed tape, and then a thin tape layer of green in between them. Then I fussy cut the 2 birdhouses and the beehive out of some paper.

   I created the poles for the birdhouses from some strips of  scrap paper. I also added some plants and the bird using some punch out images from 49 and Market. I then used a Sam Poole/Creative Expressions stamp set. There's a small stamp that has a little bee cluster. I stamped that image several times around the beehive. Those bees are always busy out on the hunt for pollen.

   The tag at the top (which is not crooked but my journal is almost finished so the pages aren't laying flat) was cut out of a sheet of paper. I stamped the quote from the same Sam Poole set that the bees came from. 

   And speaking of bees, I haven't shared any photos from my two hives as of late. It's very exciting because my new hive is doing great (as you will see), and I can finally say, after 5 years, that I have a second hive going. 😏👍❤.  And as you'll also see, my older hive is making honey in the  super/extra honey box, so it looks like I'll get a good batch this year. 😏👍❤ I don't take honey from a first year hive because the bees have to start making honey and filling an empty hive, but older hives usually have a reserve. 

   First here's one side of one frame in the new hive. Look at all the capped (brown) brood there is.

     That means the queen is successfully laying eggs which are needed to sustain the population of the hive.  In this next photo if you look on the middle-left side of the hive  you can actually see the queen. She's definitely larger than all the other bees and has a black tip of her abdomen/tail. This is a different frame, and it is filling in with brood too.

   I have some funky honeycomb in my older hive. When I went to add the honey super box (the box where bees make extra honey and is the honey I can harvest) there was some honeycomb the bees were creating upward because the other frames were filled. With no space  left, I guess you just go up-kind of like land in a big city. I decided to let them continue their upward creation rather than removing that  comb because I was curious what would happen.  I took a couple of frames out of the super before I added it.

   The bees have continued building this comb, and when I went into the hive the other morning I could see some honey glistening in it. These next 2 photos show that funky honeycomb structure. The last 2 also show it but you can see some honey glistening in the comb if you look carefully.

That's all for me today. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and thanks for stopping by my blog.