Although we had spent the last 3 days looking forward to Sunday, as we put our suits on we realised that this was actually the first time we had manipulated the bees on our own. This prompted a slightly greater emphasis being put on lighting the smoker - and more importantly, keeping it lit...
Liam did a fantastic job using a combination of dried grass and rotten wood picked up on dog walks so hopefully we now have this side of things sorted.
The bees were extremely well behaved and allowed us to inspect them with no problems. The new frames had been beautifully drawn out on one side and we reversed them as planned. We found lots of eggs and larvae and plenty of sealed brood. The only thing that looked slightly unusual (to our very untrained eyes) was the presence of some partially sealed brood - I dont know if we had disturbed the bees who might have been still working on it or whether this is not uncommon but we both noticed one of two cells where capping had definitely started but seemed to have been abandoned leaving larvae exposed.
Liam spotted the Queen - thank goodness... I was worried that we had inadvertently killed her... We then cleared off quite a lot of brace comb which was hanging off the bottom of the frames, closed up, and left it on top of the hive for the bees to clean up.
The plan is now to add another two or possibly 3 frames on Wednesday and then reverse them on Monday.
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