As per directions from Jack, our bee inspector, we took a pickle jar full of rubbing alcohol out to the area where the bees were crawling in the grass and collected around 100 bees. We'll soak them overnight, pour off the alcohol and send them to the bee lab for analysis.
We then cracked open both hives. The hive on the right (not pictured) had few bees in the top box, but that top super was chock full of honey. We believe the cluster in that hive is in the top deep and has not yet moved up. We popped a couple grease patties on the top bars and closed it up. Then we cracked open the left hive (pictured above and below) to see how they looked. (This is the hive with bees crawling in the grass as described in yesterday's blog entry.)
There seemed to be a lot of bees in the top super, ready to greet us.
We checked their honey supply, and found that some of the frames were empty, so we gave them two frames of honey that we'd had stored in the freezer. Still, they had many frames of honey, having had a great fall harvest.
We had made the grease patties last night when our top theory was tracheal mites. One part Crisco, two parts granulated sugar, one good squeeze of honey. We've heard today that tracheal mites have not been prevalent in our area, but decided to go ahead and slap the grease patties up there for good measure, since they didn't strike us as terribly toxic. We'll see what the lab says.
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