I went and checked the bees out today. I haven’t gone through the whole hive since last October although I did check them out in March just to see if they had enough honey-they did. Now that the fair is over I actually had some time to catch up on a few things and the bees were definitely on my mind. I wanted to check out the hive to see how they were doing. I saw a fair amount of drone cells, not many worker bee cells, maybe a start of a few queen cells- maybe not but their thinking about it) and a lot of busy bees. As usual I couldn’t find Houdini (the queen). I named her that last year as she is very good at hiding from me! I worry a little since I didn’t see a lot of brood cells so I will be watching closely and will check it out in a week. Perhaps a bunch just hatched as there were so many out and about. I also saw lots of bees at Caleb’s hive (which died in February) and was wondering if mine were swarming but upon inspection, my bees were after his hive’s crystallized honey although there wasn’t a lot. So I cleaned up his whole hive, took off much of the old comb and swept out all the bees that had died. I left the old combs out on top of the hive for the bees to clean out the honey since they seemed so interested. Now that hive is clean and ready if a swarm comes by!

This week I will also put together a new beehive that Elodie’s brother, Mark built for me. Pictures will be forthcoming!