New Beekeeper Assistant

After a week of getting the garden ready for fall, it was time to open up the hives and see how the new queens were faring.  My nephew expressed interest in beekeeping so we both suited up and I gave him a tour of the bee hives and answered questions.  It's always fun telling new-Bees about life in the hive.  There's plenty of interesting subjects to talk about in the life of a bee.  And my nephew seemed to enjoy helping out and observing the bees and the hives.  And for me, it was nice having an extra set of hands available.

First time in a hive for my assistant

The bees seemed to be doing all right for this time of the year.  At the local beekeeper meeting I heard that many bees in this area were running low on honey as this is a slow time of the year for nectar, but mine seemed to be doing pretty good.   Some of my bees had very little brood but there were queens.  One hive had a ton of brood though.  I still put a couple feeders on hives and only pulled a few frames out of each hive for inspection to be as unobtrusive as possible.  The lack of brood in the hives will work itself out I'm sure.  And I'm pretty sure I saw stick eggs in those hives.

The good news is the ant problem is solved for now.  There were a couple ants on a few lids but most of them were pretty clean.  Zero hive beetles were found but there were wax moths in the diatomaceous earth in the lower trays.  Hopefully the diatomaceous earth will do it's job and eradicate the wax moths.

But all in all the hives all looked well and the bees were much much calmer.  Queenless bees get agitated easily and now all the hives have queens so that's making a big difference.  After opening all hives we walked away and none followed us.  A month ago I would have had 200 bees attacking me still at 100 yards from the hive.  But that was pretty much from one particularly mean hive which is no more.