Hello, and welcome back to The Bee Vlog
I'm Bill
It's time to do another inspection on Queen Karma.
It's actually been 2 months since I did an inspection
You might be thinking "Wow, that's a long time to go without doing an inspection."
For a new beekeeper it's probably advised to inspect more frequently
so that you can get to know and learn what's going on inside the hive.
The most you'd want to be digging into a hive is about once a week.
About once a month is fine too.
So waiting 2 months is not a big deal for me
I haven't been ignoring them
I have been coming out and doing external inspections, which just involves watching the outside of the hive
and seeing what you can learn from watching the outside.
Whenever you open a hive you want to have some purpose in mind.
Some reason to be doing the inspection
If that reason is just to learn and observe that's fine.
That's a valid reason.
Today the reason I'm opening the hive is to see how honey storage is coming along.
The last time I did an inspection
I added this 2nd box,
and I moved 2 of the frames from the bottom up into the top.
I also gave them mostly drawn out comb.
Every other frame had drawn comb on it.
They've actually been putting brood out here
on this edge frame.
It looks like the queen has been very busy.
I'm going to put this one back and start from the other side.
There's where all the honey is.
By checking these edge frames I can see how far they've gotten in the honey storage.
Because the edge ones are the last ones to get honey and since this is full...
not yet capped...you can see that there are several open cells here that the nectar isn't ripe yet
or dried out yet.
So they look like they're okay.
They've filled out this box, they still have room for brood.
You know, when you do an inspection you don't have to look at every frame.
Once you've satisfied your goal of entering the box, you're done and you can stop.
So I saw what I'm looking for.
They look healthy.
There's a very good population here.
The queen is still laying eggs.
And they have a lot of honey.
I don't need to go down into the bottom box.
And I can close things up.