5th Inspection

Today's peek was to see if anything was happening in the upper hive body. Since last week four frames have been drawn into comb in the upper body and most of the empty cells were filled with eggs. I needed to remove some burr comb from the top of the frames and from between two frames. Apparently, I didn't have the frames pushed tightly together so there was too much space between them. I needed to really jam my hive tool between the upper and lower hive bodies and pry around the edges to get the two unstuck. I lifted the upper body off and the bees came boiling out of the lower body. Some swarmed over the sides and others flew in a bee cloud around me. I smoked them back into submission and examined the frames. The center frames contain empty cells where pupae have hatched. The others contain larvae and capped brood in a nice tight oval pattern. There was also quite a bit of burr comb on the top bars that I removed. The bees seemed agitated today so I didn't bother to take photos, and for the first time since hiving the bees in early June I was stung. One flew up my pants leg and nailed me on the inner thigh. Ouch. Bet that will happen again.