Checking and Robbing the Hives

Here is the Assistant Beekeeper pulling a frame out of the super on the little hive to see if they had any capped honey. They have drawn out honey comb in this super and filled it with nectar, but so far very few caps. Still, we're just pleased and proud to see them flourishing. After we process honey from the other hive, we're going to give them one of the supers so they have room to expand. We'll also pop in a queen excluder so they don't put any brood in the supers.

We then proceeded to the super duper tall hive. We checked the four supers, rearranged a bit and popped a fume board on the top (pictured below) to get the bees out of two supers of capped honey.

The bottom super had capped honey with brood along the bottom of the frames. We left that for them, and put a queen excluder on top of that super. We moved the very top super on top of the excluder, since it was full of nectar but not capped honey.

The two middle supers were chock full of capped honey, so they were moved to the top, emptied mostly of bees and popped in the wheelbarrow for transport to the house. The lovely towels prevent us picking up hitchhikers on the way.


So the tall hive now consists of two deeps, one shallow super with honey and a little brood, a queen excluder and one shallow super filled with nectar. The Assistant Bee Keeper is hollering at me to get moving so we can process some honey. More on that later!