Day 6 with the bee's

And i thought yesterday was hot lol....i was worrying what this heat does to the 2 hives especially as they are south facing so have the heat for most of the day...i saw the odd dead bee on the path going up to the hives so was thinking the worst. I heard that we were due storms so wanted to at least check one of the hives if possible and by 6pm both kim and myself decided we could not leave it any longer and opened the busier of the 2 hives up.

even taking out the first frame we could see that the bee's were drawing the comb which means producing wax onto the wax sheets that are in the wooden frames. In the picture below you can see at the bottom left how the wax looks raised...

the next frame even more so, it even had pollen stores within some of the cells if you look at the frame to the left you can see different colours within the cells (red, green etc.) thats the pollen.

Kim was in her element as you can see lol

the next frame was from the original nucleus we recieved and as you can see ...a lot more bee's

This next picture is my favourite as well because you can see the queen on it...see if you can spot her :)

The syrup i had left was gone and in fact the container held about 20 dead bee's not sure why as the other hive did not have that problem? I was going to leave the other hive till tuesday but Kim said we had time so we opened it up, unfortunetly still no sign that a queen is present. There are not as many bee's as in hive 2, there are a lot of drone bee's (males) we saw that they are bringing in pollen, and nectar but not much evidence of brood (larvae, eggs) though there were some newly hatched bee's present. I will ring our supplier up tomorrow letting them know i will check one last time for the queen when i finish work tuesday which means introducing a queen the colony has never met before and hopefully she will be in time to help the hive build up in time for the winter....but lets see what tomorrow brings :) until then l8rs my friends.