Honey, Honey, Honey

    Hi everyone. I hope you're having a super weekend. So far mine has been busy and the weather has been almost September like  (warm without the humidity). ❤

   Today I'm joining Nicole for Sunday in the Art Room  and Gillena for Sunday Smiles . I have lots of bees in today's post so I hope this post doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies. 

  The other day I went out to do a bee hive check. Both hives are doing really well. Let me share a few photos with you.

    A) I'll start with my new hive, the one where the bees arrived this May:

    For some reason a lot of these ladies like to enter the hive by going under the top cover and under the outer edge of the inner screen cover as you can see in this first photo. There is a small gap there, which is there so bees can go in and out that way. In the 6 years I've had hives, I have never had any that used that opening as their normal way in and out though.   

    The screen  is the warm weather inner cover because it helps air flow through the hive to keep it from getting too hot. In the winter a solid inner cover gets put on.

   When the bees first arrived in May, I only had one box on the hive. But then the bees got busy with laying eggs, raising young and making honey. In order to give them enough room,  the last time I checked them I added a second box to the hive. 

    The bees now use the bottom box for their brood and the top box for making honey. This is the honey they will need for winter, so I will not take this honey. In fact, I won't take any honey from this hive this year.

    I have still been feeding them with a food patty (you can see the wrappers in the next photo), just because there is a lot of bees, and I want them to produce a good store of honey for the winter. Even with that, they seem to go through a patty in about 2 weeks. 

  Here's some of them actually using the front"normal" hive entrance.

   These next 2 photos are looking down into the hive. This is the top box, and you can see all the white comb they are building. This is what they will fill with honey and then cap.

    And what a crowd they have building that comb. 

  B) I'll move onto the old hive, or the one that came in 2025 and made it through the winter.  In this hive the ladies always go in and out through the main hive entrance.

   One thing I find interesting about this hive is how little they care whether I am there or not. Even when I open up the hive. The new hive is not that way at all. The new hive is very curious and a lot of bees come check me out.

   Earlier this year I added a smaller third box to this hive because the second box, where they store honey, was already quite full. This smaller box is called the honey super, and the honey that gets made there will be for me.

   You might remember the weird comb they formed. ( The post I explained about this is here: The Art of Bee Keeping.) Now that comb is pretty much full of honey, capped off and done. They are also building newer honey comb in the frames that are in this box which in the next few weeks should be filled up with honey too. 

    I decided I needed to have a few tastes of their labors, so I poked the comb with my finger a few times.  It was delicious.

   This is the first year I've ever had a honey supper filling up with honey. Now I need to learn about how to collect that honey. 🐝🐝🍯

  I'll finish my post with this funny that CJ sent along to me. I liked it so much I saved the photo.

Have a super rest of your Sunday and start to the new week.