Busy July for All!

Ben with nephews Erwan and Alex from France

What a busy month of July for our bees as well as for us! Our family came to visit us. It was fun and enjoyable and even "educational" at times. We took our nephews to inspect our hives. They really enjoy watching the bees, coming and leaving the hives and love to smoke the bees. They asked a million questions and  they even helped us.

Nice brood pattern on frame, the queen is doing well.

Looking inside the hive, lots of bees

July has been rather hot and humid with often low clouds. Bees don't forage when it is overcast and grey, so few got a bit annoyed at the relentless "Florida-like" weather. However, they seem to collect nectar and pollen as usual. Our 6 hives are doing fine, and the supers where the honey is stored are getting heavier each week. Lots of eggs, brood, larvae, pollen and nectar. The queen are good layers and healthy. Now the urge to swarm is over and the bees are foraging and getting ready for Winter!

Comb structure, beautiful!

This year we have encountered some interesting happenings in beekeeping:

 In one of our colony, our bees have decided to store their honey in a deep box that was originally designed to raise their own brood! Therefore that huge box is full of honey and weighs about 35 lb.  I am doing all the heavy lifting since Ben broke his wrist, and I can tell you that it is very heavy to lift such a weight past your shoulder in the hot and humid Minnesota climate of ours!

Bees also chose not to go investigate the upper "deck", aka the supers that we religiously place for them in order to collect honey in the fall. It was interesting to watch them, they just seemed very shy and uninterested . They were walking on the foundation, pretending to be busy, making little wax and filling few cells with nectar. They should have been loading the cells with nectar. To attract them in the upper level, we placed some frames full of honey: to show them, "Here is where your nectar goes". Then we waited a week. Nothing more happened. We were astonished! We then used every other empty frames and mixed them with frames full of honey, again to show them! Still nothing much!!!!

One more thing that our bees gave us as a challenge: You know very well that honeybees are magnificent architect. So in one hive, the honeybees have again plotted on their own to build a super comb structure making sure that it does not touch the foundation too much! This is going to be fun to extract!

And last week at our  wits' end , we removed all queen excluders, thinking that it would help the honeybees to go up in their hives and store the bulk of their nectar where it belongs...on top! This screen is usually used to prevent the queen (fatter than other bees) to go up in the supers to lay eggs in the collected nectar.
Beekeeping is never dull, now you know why.