Only 4 days into having bees in my backyard I was becoming concerned due to the apparent crowded-ness of one of the hives. I decided to do an open hive inspection to see how much they'd expanded in the single, deep hive body and found that the colony which had been on five nuc frames was actively drawing comb on all 10 frames and every frame was crowded with bees. This led me to the decision to go ahead and add a medium super and a queen excluder.
Since I was opening hives, I decided to go ahead and check my second hive. This colony is still mostly on the original five frames. The brood pattern had more open spots. I decided to check on the health of the queen - decided to look for her and check for eggs. Didn't find a queen (probably due to my inexperience). I *think* I saw some eggs, but I'm not sure. And I don't recall if there were uncapped larvae. I saw something that could be an emergency queen cell, or maybe a supercedure cell... not sure (again due to lack of experience).
Afterwards I reflected on a few things:
- open hive inspections are intense and lead to extreme focus - nothing to focus the senses like working with 50,000 stinging insects
- on first hive I assessed for overall population and expansion throughout brood box because there were lots of bees
- on second hive I was more concerned with finding evidence of an actively laying queen - inexperience prevented conclusions
- missed opportunity on first hive to assess for more information - were there swarm cells, how was brood pattern, etc?
- I have some hive beetles, I wonder if tweezers might be a handy tool to grab them. Anyway, need to get some beetle blasters
- probably need to develop a standard open hive inspection checklist to work through to minimize missed opportunities (at least until I have more experience and better intuition)
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