Hive Check 5/22/17

Kat and I checked on the Sunflower River hive yesterday. It was a good day: warm and full of blooming things. It was off and on blustery, so it wasn't perfect, but that's okay. I think it was around 1:30 in the afternoon when we got into the hive.

My main task with today was getting the brood box I added two weeks ago swapped out with the newly routered box, and to see how they were doing. I noticed that the bees were particularly grumpy, and that was probably for two reasons: they had a huge gap in their hive that was probably letting cold and robbers in, and they were out of sugar water. So we're not caring well enough for those bees!

Kat went back to make sugar water while I got into the hive. The smoker -- which I had Kat light this time, because she's better with fire-making -- went out after one puff into the entrance. So I did this without smoke, which I don't think would have mattered, because they were pissed off already.

I checked on the various frames, finding the queen relatively quickly and making sure she was put back when I did. She's still there, but the progress from last hive check to this hive check is almost stunted. I didn't notice any growth, and I wonder how long they've been without food. We'll probably have to feed them throughout the summer at this rate, and I'm happy to do that to help them get established.

One thing of note is that I pulled one frame out and the wind gusted just at that moment, scattering the bees off of it (I'm SO glad I found the queen early and put her back) and onto me! They all fell on my shoes and I realized I hadn't tucked in the legs of my jeans. Sure enough, a bee crawled up my pants leg and I got my first sting of the season on my calf. It was my first bee sting since I was, like, 9 years old, so I was interested to find out how the sting would go. It hurt for five minutes while the venom was being pumped in (I was too in the middle of tasks to go reaching down there and scraping the thing out). But after that it was done: no swelling, no pain after the initial few minutes, just a red dot where the stinger was in my skin. I did stop breathing, but...just kidding. So it was good to get a sense of how I react to bee stings.

Anyway, I swapped out the brood box and put the hive back together. We gave them a full bottle of sugar water, and we stepped away. I'll look at them all again next week just to see how they're doing again, and get on a better schedule.