Yep I got down there today, had a look. Unfortunately within 5 minutes my gloves were too covered in honey to even think about touching the camera :roll: Take my gloves off you say? no thank you, I couldn't get my smoker together so no smoke and these aren't the most docile of bees, got stung quite a few times through my gloves and suit.
I was amazed the lid came off quite easily, a bit of burr comb inside the lid above my inner cover. Under that though was a complete and total mess of comb. Combo of not having touched this hive in about 4 months, wrong sized frames for the box and 1 frame short for all that time meant burr comb everywhere, most frames were drawn out a short way, then another completely new sheet of comb was built from the top bar hanging next to the foundation :needhelp: Plus at the bottom of every frame was cross comb in the space below, full of honey and drone brood. All I can say is I'm glad I took a knife and a 25L bucket with a lid.
Managed to get all the frames out and clean them up somewhat, no smoke mind you so it was a hell of a racket. As I cleaned up the frame, dumping all the burr comb into the bucket, I placed it into the new, correctly sized box. Once that was full I had room for 1 more frame, put that in and put the box back on, sealed it all up and walked away.
Oh yeah...back to the point :-D The colony looks in great shape, no wax moth, lots of busy workers, plenty of honey (could have even extracted half the frames) All looked well and barely any drones (all dead at the entrance) but some drone brood. There was only 1 frame of normal brood in the top box (no excluder) and it had a good tight pattern, so queenie is okay as well. Didn't go down into the brood box, not today after what I just did.
Had a quick look into my other two and one needs about the same thing as I did today done to it, and the other is about as good as I could wish for; was a swarm from last year and I only put a box full of new frames and an excluder on two weeks ago. They are "Manley" sized frames with plastic foundation, every one was completely drawn out and nearly fully capped! :-D Glad I bought an extractor the other day, going to need it next week :-D
Yak yak yak yak yak :roll: