This week we have a special guest: my friend and co-worker, and experienced beekeeper Andrea. She is a far more engaging host and I greatly appreciate her generosity in sharing her knowledge and equipment through this learning process. We had high hopes for the inspection as you hear in Andrea’s introduction of our plan. As per the usual so far, we made a plan…and then life (or the bees) had a different one.

The plan had been to do some minor reorganization of the brood box. There are two frames where the bees only like one side for honey storage and have not built any comb on the other, so I thought we would move those two half frames out and let them build fresh comb so that they had ten full frames. I was simply trying to maximize usable space. If they haven’t used a part of the foundation, it’s often that there is something about it that they don’t like. In my case, the foundation is somewhat old, which could be putting them off. My goal has been to switch to foundationless frames so it seemed a good time to continue that process.

Once we pulled the feeder box and inner cover, we discovered that the bees had been very busy over the past couple weeks. I had fed them sugar syrup twice and with that they had almost completely cleaned up the old comb and drawn out the empty frames on the honey super. Plus, they had filled it at least half full of honey in various stages of completion and capping. Ahhhh, that was the delicious smell that had been regularly wafting from the hive on warm days. I do not have a particularly adept sense of smell, but it is a delectable, unique melange of flavors. Trying to describe it feels a lot like describing wine: it has hints of honey, wax, vanilla, and caramel with distinct floral notes. Marc says it smells distinctly earthy. If you have never had the opportunity to smell a beehive, add it to your bucket list. It’s a delight!

We scrapped our original plan to pull the two half-built frames and find the queen, deciding that all was well in their colony and there was no need to disrupt it to go deeper into the nest this time. Instead, we added another honey super along with the queen excluder. This super would not be filled with honey made from sugar syrup as they had plenty of resources to support themselves at this point and there was no need to continue feeding them. Instead this super, if filled, will be the excess that I hope to harvest, leaving the bees with the lower super and filled brood nest for their winter provisions.