Well my friend and I went down to south Georgia yesterday afternoon and picked up our 8 hives that were down there building up from splits that were done about a month ago. We have a good friend that has hives in the 100s and he allowed us to work his yards with him and in exchange we got the splits needed to fill our 8 hives. We have our hives set on pallets so we have four pallets with two hives apiece. When we got in to the Powder Springs area last night at 1am it started to rain on us just as we were getting ready to download the pallets (figures) but the girls were in very good spirits and gave us no problems at all.
We got into them briefly this afternoon just so that we could get a good look and see how the splits had taken. They are in double deeps because when we went down a month ago to install the hives we figured they were going to build up really fast and it would be necessary to have our own hive bodies down there to put on when needed. Well they all are to the point right now where that additional hive body is not only needed but being used. I would say out of the 8 we have 5 that are actively using that second box and if it was not there they would surely be thinking of swarming.
In hive DL we have 4-5 frames in the center that are totally drawn out on both sides and filled with capped honey. When we saw that both of our eyes got as big as saucers. We plan to get back into them next Saturday to do a more thorough inspection and possibly balance them some. We went ahead and put a gallon of syrup on each hive just in case, this week is suppose to be pretty stormy.
When we were working on them this afternoon there were moments of nice bright sunshine and moments of drizzle. The water you see on the lids in the photos is from the drizzle. We also have some bees with good temperament due to the fact we were in them pretty good this afternoon in the dreary weather and we never even fired up the smoker. Did not have any veil thumps and not a single sting, just a bunch of busy bees.