First, several people have asked if there are bees in Sweet Beezus. The current answer is no. I decided against ordering another package of bees this year, instead hoping to attract a swarm. A few weeks ago, there was a buzz inside Sweet B one afternoon and it appeared a swarm had taken up residency. By the next day, however, the bees had moved on.
Today I noticed a lot of frantic activity in front of the Rocky hive, so I went out to prepare Sweet Beezus in case the activity turned out to be another swarm. When I opened Sweet B, I saw some icky, scary stuff: there was evidence of wax moths, a couple of roaches and a whole colony of earwigs. I started taking the hive apart, removing the frames that had wax moth webs, knocking the earwigs and roaches out...and then I turned over the bottom board to brush off some spider egg cocoons. Fortunately I spotted the round black spider before my fingers reached it — it was a black widow! YIKES! Talk about inhospitable for new bees!
I cleaned up Sweet B as best I could, put in some clean frames and added some "bee lure," a pheromone that is supposed to attract bees. Perhaps now it will be more inviting.
Second, I harvested my first batch of honey for the year a couple of weeks ago. I took only five frames each out of Apollo and Rocky, and spent half a day crushing, straining and filtering the honey. Those 10 frames (from medium supers) yielded about 30 pounds of honey. I left three half-finished frames in each super and replaced the ones I took out with empty frames. Also, I moved the shallow honey supers to the top of each hive and was excited to see those were almost full of capped honey, too!
