As some of you may know... we (todd really) bought a complete be hive, with a colony of bees a couple/few weeks ago. Other than setting the hive up, We have not really cracked into them until today. the only thing we did was remove the inner cover, add a pail feeder.
today, as we cracked into the hive this is what we say..
1. we removed the outer cover, and feeder pail. the bees consumed maybe 1/8 or less of the sugar water (mixed 1:1) we removed the empty super body surrounding the pail feeder and inner cover exposing the 2nd (top) deep.
2. we pulled 2 frames from the top deep. the upper deeps frames were STUCK in hard. tons of propolis, and honey sticking them together) we didnt see a lot of bees in the top deep, but in the 2 frames we pulled, they were full of honey. it was also pretty darned heavy. no queen noticed.
3. we removed the upper deep feeling as though it was full of honey. when we removed it, there was comb built between the two deeps, and some (freshly dead) larvae. set upper deep to the side.
4. as we began to remove frames from the lower deep we noticed a lot of the combs were empty. there was maybe 25% coverage on them of capped cells, pollen cells, larvae cells, act. the coverage was a lot less. there was more bees in the lower deep, but there was less activity on the comb. we did see one thing that we wernt sure what to make of... 1 LARGE QUEEN CELL IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE OF THE FRAMES!
5. we added a super a reassembled the hive.
as far as behavior goes, everything seemed normal. as far as numbers... i expected there to be a lot more bees, but maybe im wrong. there was def a bunch of them.
what are your thoughts on what we saw? we didnt pull and inspect every frame so i cant say for sure that we do or dont have a queen. i assume from the larvae (that we think are almost in all stages of growth) that we have one. but we also so a queen cell which a lot of the bees seemed attracted too.
this colony is at least in it second spring. it was a swarm collected by the guy we bought everything from.
ill ad pics soon!