Busy bees

 

A few weeks ago we did a check up on the bees.  They seemed quite active to me, maybe a little different than usual. It's hard to say how you can recognize bee behavior, especially when I don't stick my head in to see what they're up to all that often.

 

But somehow, things seemed a big different.  We had two boxes on at that point. I'm so bad with all this bee terminology, I don't even know what they're called (which I'm sure would be really helpful). In any case, there were two boxes, and a third on that top that had some bee food. That was to help them get through our super cool spring and the beginning of summer. 

 

Jeremy took that box off and then we started looking into the top box with frames. Holy cow. The bees had been REALLY busy! Each of the individual frames of honey/way/etc probably weighed 4-5 pounds a piece! It was intense!

 

Anyway, we swapped some things around and then put on a third box. This is good news for us and the bees. Last year our bees never got far enough along for a third box. Jeremy is going to check them again this weekend and see if it's time to put a super on. (I do know that word! Uh... not exactly sure what that means. I DID take a long class about all this and read a lot, but I've forgotten!)

 

A few days after adding the third box, the bees were doing this: 

 

I'm hoping they were just partying. A beekeeper friend says it's possible this was robber bees stealing our honey! But we're not sure yet if anything has gone wrong. They're not doing this anymore and there continues to be bees coming and going from the hive. So we'll see!