First Inspection

After installing the package last week I was anxious to take a peek inside to see how things were going. It's recommended that you wait anywhere between 3 to 7 days before opening the hive to ensure that the new queen has been completely accepted by her new subjects. When the package is assembled, bees are taken from one or two hives and the queen comes from someplace else. Meaning that she is a stranger to the bees surrounding her cage in the package. Given the chance, in those first few days after introduction, the bees are more likely to kill her as invite her to tea. The queen gives off several pheromones including one that makes her subjects happy and contented with her presence. After a few days of this scent circulating through the hive - about the time it takes for everyone to eat away the candy plug in her cage to release her - she becomes supreme potentate with all ready to do her bidding. This is what the beekeeper hopes to have been achieved by the time he opens the hive for inspection. For some reason, when things go wrong for the bees during those first critical days, such as an invasion from some impossibly large foreign thug with a smoker, they like to blame the queen for their troubles and may decide on a palace coup to set things right. Alas, the thanks she gets for laying thousands of eggs, day after day, is a lethal mob who keep their compound eyes trained on her for any perceived sign of weakness or malfeasance of duty.
As I say, I was anxious to open that hive up and see what they had been up to, but I respected the waiting period. I didn't have much choice anyway because the weather in the week since I installed the package has been historically bad for mid-April. Very cold with a couple of days of gale-force winds. I was beginning to think the gods were not happy with my choice of hobbies. But at last, on Friday, the weather turned beautiful. A cloudless sunny day with temperatures around 70 degrees. I took the day off work and in the afternoon, I set to work. I gathered all my tools, lit my smoker and put on my gear. With my better half looking on from a safe distance, I smoked the entrance to the hive, took off the top cover and smoked the bees that were up in the hive-top feeder. The sound of buzzing grew as the bees scrambled out of the way and ran for their small store of honey I guess. I cracked the feeder off the brood box and shot a few puffs of smoke in there too. I waited a bit for the message to get across and then I hoisted the feeder off of the hive and set it aside.
Readers of this blog will recall that I wrote of a high mortality rate on installation day ---
(B-Day). Apparently, the number of deaths were trifling, because I'm happy to report that many, many bees survived that day. The hive box consists of ten suspended frames that contain beeswax foundation on which the bees will draw out comb in which to lay eggs and store pollen, honey, nectar & water. The three or four middle frames were completely covered in bees. A roiling mass of tiger-striped workaholics. There were many bees flying around but the great majority stayed put on the frames. I took out the first frame closest to the outside wall and hung it on a rack specially made for the purpose. No comb had been started here and there were only a half dozen bees on the frame - probably playing hooky. I then worked my way towards the center, lifting each frame and examining it. The first few were like the wall frame with no comb and reletively few bees but as I got towards the center, the frames were heavy with thousands of bees so thick it was difficult to see the foundation under them. I could tell that they had begun comb on three or four of these middle frames but, try as I might, I could not find the queen in these masses. I was hoping it would be easy to see her because she came with a nice blue spot painted on her back. It was like finding Waldo. After looking for a time, I gave up.
I had suspended her cage initially between the sixth and seventh frames. I saw that the plug was now gone and the queen had escaped into the hive to hobnob with the riff raff. I pulled the cage out and after brushing off the clinging workers, set it aside. Because the cage was hanging between the frames, it had created a condition in which I had violated what is known as "bee space." A fellow named Langstroth in the nineteenth century had figured out that bees like a space of about 3/8 of an inch between things. Anything less than that, they fill with something called propolis, a dark sticky goop that they use to seal up cracks and other small openings in the hive. If the space is much bigger than that bee space, the little critters will endeavor to fill it with wild, or burr comb - not a good outcome for the beekeeper for various reasons. My girls had taken the opportunity to build two large, suspended marvels of such engineering in the space on either side of the queen's cage. Beautiful white, oval structures that they had filled with pollen and an incredibly sticky, clear substance that I assume to be nectar on its way to becoming honey? Have to ask about that one! Using my hive tool, I carefully removed this comb, cleared off the multitudes of bees and set it aside at a safe distance. Later, on further inspection with an eye loop, I also saw several eggs tucked away in several cells! Yippee! That meant the invisible queen was doing her thing as recently as two days ago anyway. At this point, I reassembled the hive with my only concern being that I couldn't be sure that the queen was okay. Odds are she is, but having never seen her I couldn't be sure where she might have ended up during the operation of removing the wild comb. Was she on there? I never saw her but who knows. I guess I'll have to wait for the next inspection to find out. Stay tuned...