Hello, welcome to The Bee Vlog.
It's time to do an inspection on Queen Karma here.
Now this year I'm going to do my inspections a little bit differently.
In the past 2 years whenever inspected a hive I would shoot a video of it.
And last year, since I had 9 hives, that took quite a bit of my time
both shooting the video and editing the videos.
So this year, because I'm really busy with other projects and family duties and other things in my life
I'm just going to be shooting inspection videos on this one hive this year.
This was a swarm I caught one month ago.
So through the year I'm going to be showing the progress the hive goes through in building up in preparing for the winter.
Then hopefully we'll see if it survives the winter
and we'll be able to see the full 1 year progress from swarm through winter
into the following spring.
Since it's been a month since this hive swarmed there should be a new generation of house bees starting to emerge.
This means there will be more foraging going on, more nectar coming in, and more bees being born every day.
That means they're going to be running out of room very soon.
When I do the inspection today I'm going to be looking through and inspecting the brood pattern
and I'm going to be adding another box.
When I do an inspection I don't like to use a lot of smoke, but I do like to have some.
I give a couple puffs...
and let it kind of "soak in."
I give it about 30 seconds.
Especially a hive this small, you don't really have to use a lot of smoke.
After I crack the inner cover open I like to give one more puff of smoke under the lid before lifting it off.
It lets them know I'm coming.
When I put this swarm in the hive I gave them some filled out frames.
You can see these ones that have a "13" on them are ones that were from last year.
I think some of these other ones were also, I just didn't have them numbered.
So I did give them some drawn comb, but they haven't filled out all the way to the edge.
They have 3 frames here that haven't been started yet.
So this was the edge frame and they've got a nice looking brood pattern here.
Very full of worker brood.
The bees are very calm.
They're not guarding or acting defensive at all.
I'm going to set that aside here.
I prefer not to do that with the brood frames but that's the edge
You can see that some of the bees have already started to emerge.
The queen usually starts to lay in the center and works her way outward.
And these center cells are emptied and have an egg placed in them now.
That means that those bees have emerged and the ones next to them will start to emerge soon as well.
This frame, even though it has a "13" on it, this was empty when I put it in.
I can tell by the color of the comb that it's brand new.
So they filled this out and have been laying eggs in it.
One of the things I really like seeing here is the multi-color worker bees.
I'm seeing a very good variety of colors and banding.
Some of the bees have no yellow at all, they're very grey with black bands
and some are brown with black bands.
This tells me that the queen is very well mated with a good variety of drones.
A lot of young larvae and eggs in here.
A good looking pattern.
Very filled out.
Storing honey in the corners.
This was another empty frame when I installed them.
All fully drawn out with brood in it.
This comb is older, this is actually from 2 years ago.
I can tell by the darker color and also one of the markings on this bar I recognize from 2 years ago.
I'm not going to go through every frame, you don't really have to.
You don't really need to see the queen.
We know that there's a queen in here because I saw eggs.
I'm going to close things up, and I'm going to add another box.
The way I'm going to add a second box is by doing what's called a pyramid or "pyramid up."
That involves taking 2 or 3 frames from the bottom and moving them up into the top.
So I'm going to take frames 3 and 5 here and move them up.
And then I'm going to replace them with frames 3 and 5 from the top.
I'm going to give them a drawn-out comb down here in the bottom.
Don't forget to replace the frame that was taken out.
Always center the frames up
before adding a box.
Center those frames and I can close it up.
Now they have to entrances to use, as they grow bigger they'll need more space to come in and out.