this thread is awesome I love it
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Beestation: sage 3 soon
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Golden 3.
2020202020
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Autoclose timer removed from this thread. Thank you for sharing your hive with us 
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thankies Crossedfall
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Yeet, I thought I was going to have to get off my ass tomorrow and upload the last inspection after I get into the hive again
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that sick how much honey can you get:+1:
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On a really good year, about 80Lbs I’ve heard. It really depends on local area. The university bee keeping club I was part of would harvest a few thousand pounds from all their hives.
The timeline for a hive is usually something like:
-
New hive
-
Bees build up wax and population all year
-
Bees maybe fill up a few frames in a super after filling a deep
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Steal what you can from the super if they have enough honey in the deeps
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Winter arrives and they eat the honey in the deeps
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Season two starts
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You can steal some from deeps now
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bees just refill deeps and supers quickly since the honeycomb is built already
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Harvest so much honey that you cant give it away
My problem with my Italian bees is that I made it to Season Two, then there was a wildfire in my area for a month in late summer. The bees were dealing with costant smoke, so ate all their honey then left after 4 straight weeks of ash raining down.
The honey I did get after winter did fill about 3 mason jars though!
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What size? There are a lot of sizes of mason jars.
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32oz for a total of 96oz or 2.8 liters
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Short bee update - this was when I had a friend over to help on May 8th. Just teaching them beehive stuff, so I didnt get a lot of photos on this particular inspection.
My goals for this inspection were to:
- Check that emergency queen cell again
- Refill the syrup
- Clean up burr comb
They had emptied the entire feeder in two days, per usual.
The population is starting to get dense when this is everyone on top of the frames!
Here the bees have built a lot up on the bottom of the inner cover. I had originally planned to just scrape burr comb and refill the feeder, but the frames were packed enough with stores and brood that I felt it time to put the second deep on!
I thought I had found my unmarked queen at one point, but it didnt look right.
Scraped some of the burr comb off, exposing a bit of honey, probably! It could have been sugar syrup too, but smelled closer to honey. Here you can see the girls belly up to the bar!
Some honey from that burr comb also got onto the hive tool here, where you can see these two girls enjoying an un-packed buffet.
I ended up having to close up early because my friend squished a bee on accident in the hive with the hive tool, causing the bees to jump at it and swarm at it angrily because of the pheromones released by the body!
The emergency queen cell did not seem any different than previous inspection, and was still open, so I was still unsure whether anything had happened with it.
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Inspection Four here we goooo
I did inspection five today, so I can post four here now. (Donators are always most current 
)
Hard to catch entrance traffic as always.
Goals for today:
- Move frame holder up to second box
- Open up entrance reducer
- Refill feeder frame
- Check the old emergency queen cell for development
Pretty busy in the bottom deep!
Box two still pretty empty since I couldnt get them much syrup to draw frame out
Here is one of the frames from deep 2, you can see theyve cleaned it and are working on it a bit
This is a real good one for seeing new vs old comb.
Feeder frame moved to box 2. Goal 1 done!
Pretty busy on the frame next to where the feeder was!
When I worked the hive with my friend, we closed up quick because they squished a bee with the hive tool and the girls got mad at it quick!
You can see here the spacing between the frames isnt too good here. Partially due to closing up quick last time and having to wait so long to get back in due to the weather, and partially due to that frame I had not added in Inspection Two that was too damaged.
Here is the frame where the emergency cell was.
Hard to see it, the nub poking out, but they’ve been breaking it down, which is good!
Means queen is still bebopping and that it was from the old hive.
Can also see some capped brood here.
Scraping some burr comb off
Opened up some honey stores! Bunch of girls helping clean the hive tool again.
When moving frames, this tiny girl had fallen off (left side) and was in the dirt. They cant really fly at that stage and she is very freshly bourn from the comb, so I made sure to pick her up. She definitely wanted to lick the honey on the hive tool right away, so it took a few tries to coax her onto the tool!
You can see her tongue a bit too, still stuck out eating honey!
By this point, move of the hive were confused and either were deep in the comb to get away from the sun, or decided to forage. The spacing between the frames was tightened up a bit. It still isn’t ideal, but I always leave the two brood boxes to the queen, so it ends up being whatever they want to do with it. I don’t mind burr comb in the first box because I likely wont be working it for quite a long time.
Burr comb scraped from the top of the frames.
Glad I got the anti beetle ledge strip things, made getting the entrance reducer out way easier. Lot of bees in flight in this one.
Swapped out to the bigger entrance now. When they fill the second deep box all the way, I’ll totally remove the reducer, or do so when it gets too hot out and they start doing something called “bearding.”
Old front door! Thats all the goals done!
The trivia for these Saskatraz bees is that people say they are runny (roony? 
)
So even when they arent mad, theyre always zooping around the hive super quick compared to other breeds like my italians which were pretty slow and relaxed in the hive.
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Glorious Beestation semi-official beehive seems to be going well.
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Most definitely, theyre defs killing it in the next inspection.
Theyre draining a gallon of syrup every two days now thereabouts, so I’m bout to be buying bulk sygar to help them fill empty frames with comb
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So this is the current timeline:
I have two inspections worth of photos left to post, but the news is bad (Not from those inspections, they were doing fantastic.) I have a county apiary inspector visiting tomorrow hopefully, where normally he would inspect the colony for their health and make sure their placement was legal. Totally normal stuff every beekeeper gets. Usually you are supposed to look forward to a county/state inspection, and this was to be my first one. They’re usually very knowledgeable and friendly folks just there to help and track diseases. I thought it would be exciting, but now there has been an incident.
I had some time to check on my bees on June 4th and noticed some doing a little dance that comes from lethal amounts of pesticide, so I figured they had gone to a flower patch somewhere with pesticide in it. Not a lot, small pile of dead bees under the landing board. Still lots of brood waiting to hatch in the frames so I knew it would be recoverable.
Today, on June 6th, I got home from out of town from a great weekend. Did the usual Sunday stuff of taking down trash cans, litter box, etc. Started cleaning out the pond pump without looking up at the hive, when I got hit by an absolutely strong smell of pesticide.
Looked up, and it both smelled and looked like someone jumped over to my fence and dumped a whole can of bug spray onto the hive. The pile of bees under the hive looks like twice as many as came in the bee bus at this point, so I’m really bummed out. I can only guess it was my neighbor building a treehouse, as they are the only ones that can see the hive and when I work it now.
The inspector is supposed to come by tomorrow or later this week still, but I honestly am not sure if the hive is going to survive the week. We’re pointing a camera at them today to hope that something gets caught if the person comes back, but I doubt it. I left the inspector a message, and hopefully he has some sort of guidance be it legal or resource-wise.
If you guys want, I can keep posting the updates and how the inspection goes, but I don’t think the hive is going to make it. Pretty bummed about it.
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Well, today is the day for a new Bupdate (bee update).
In terms of the county inspector from the last update, the guy never returned my calls or emails. Absolute waste of my time. Very jaded about registering my bees for $10, having this county agricultural officer want to inspect them, and then ghosting me. It is literally their only job for this guys’ particular position.
My goals for this inspection were:
- Is there a queen?
- Are there eggs?
- Whats the general status of the bees and hive?
- Fill the syrup feeder (wtf else will I do with 10Lb/5Kg of sugar in the house and ants?)
- Decide What To Do
- Is there anything else I can find out about when they were sprayed by the neighbor?
Small black widow web outside of the hive. For some reason they like to live under the lid. Fortunately she was long gone so I didnt have to grease her. (Couldnt quite focus just right with gloves on.)
Initial opening of hive. Remember that previously there used to be a lot of activity up here. Pretty ghost town like now. If you look at the second photo from the May 28th update, it used to be much more busy.
Only one full frame of drawn comb in the upper box.
What this picture tells me, is that I was not the last person to open the hive. When I close it, I do it very slowly and listen for “oh crap help!!!-buzzing” to make sure I don’t squish any of the girls. So likely whoever sprayed the hive, cracked the lid open as well. With how many were up on the perimeter where the lid usually sits, they must have been very mad and I like to take a little solace in the idea that they probably stung whoever sprayed them a few times.
Here we can see what I can only presume are some of the after effects of the pesticide. It is hard to tell in the photo, but the honeycomb is all slanted rather than just going straight up/down. The outer edges of the photo are all fine, comb wise.
You’ll notice so far that they have no stores (honey or pollen.) I have not seen any eggs in the upper box so far. When we were last in the box, the queen had been laying up here a few times.
More weird potential side effects, you’ll notice some of the comb isn’t perfect, and actually appears to be filled in, in some places. Lots of weird smushed little cells.
At this point, I moved to the lower box. The girls seem to be doing okay here, but nothing really stands out. Previously, this box would have been very hard to see anything in, because the frames would have been near completely covered both on-top and in-between with bees.
I began inspecting the frames at this point more closely, looking for brood pattern, fresh eggs, or even a queen of some sort. I didn’t have the heart to remove any of the burr comb on the bottom. At the top, you’ll see a bright yellow section of comb - that is a new queen cup.
Lot of young bees at the bottom of the hive, it looks like they did manage to clean all the bodies out, fortunately.
Finally, I saw three different queen cups so far, which tells me they are in trouble queen-wise. There were very few eggs / minimal brood, which means either a worker had to temporarily become the queen and is hot garbage at it (very likely), or that the queen survived and is very sick.
I did not see the queen at all.
So my results of this inspection are:
- Population has dropped tremendously.
- There are some instance of Varroa mite damage.
- The hive has No stores for the winter (you may have noticed nothing is capped at all. Queen may have swarmed for greener pastures and they sucked all the pollen and honey down like hogs first.)
- There are very few eggs as far as I could tell.
- The brood pattern is near non-existent, though some bees are hatching soon. (Queen probably died recently)
The actions I can take are:
- Let nature take its course (might be out of state in 2 months)
- Buy a new queen and install her (then let nature take its course)
- Buy a new queen, food supplements, and treat for varroa mites (let them exist while I’m out of state, or sell to local club), but they’ll likely survive the winter.
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the idea of someone just spraying down bees with pesticide for little to no reason is abhorrent! I hope it doesn’t happen again!
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I’m pretty sure most serial killers start out with psychopathic tendencies like Cruelty to Animals.
Mental.
Are the bees doing all right?
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So far yes, the entrance traffic seems about the same as I last checked
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