We packed up all the bee equipment and headed out to the hives before it got to warm today. As I started to put on my veil, I saw something skidder. I may have screamed and dropped/thrown my veil on the ground. Below is a picture of what was in my veil... shudder. Bees, which can sting, climbing all over my hands and arms, no problem. Spider that will most likely do nothing other than skidder away to hide; scream, jump up and down and possibly cry. Yeah, I know...
After Hannah stopped laughing at me and Charlie checked to make sure the spider was really and truly gone, we cracked open the hives. Hannah started on her hive while Charlie started on Clover, the carniolan hive. Last week we added a second brood box and the girls are drawing out some nice comb on the empty frames. We also found nice frames full of capped brood, when we check again in two weeks we should have a nice batch of new bees. They didn't touch much of the half pollen patty, but that is not surprising with all the local trees being in bloom. Filled their feeder with a full gallon of 1:1 syrup.
Since we hadn't see the queen yet, even though we saw brood, eggs and larvae, I really wanted to get a look at her. We looked through the hive two times before Charlie found her, he has a good eye for spotting queens.
She looks quite different from Hannah's queen, but I think she's just as pretty.
Thistle, the Italian hive, is also doing well. They have eaten quite a bit of the honey we put on last week. They're drawing out comb, we found eggs, larvae and eggs. We didn't fill their feeder last weekend since we added the honey feed, so we went ahead and filled their feeder with one gallon of 1:1 syrup. Next hive check will be in two weeks.
The day was so beautiful, and the bees were so calm we didn't need to use the smoker at all.
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