Today I wanted to take a look at the Blue & Purple hive and find out if the eggs I saw last week hatched or not.

As it turns out, they had! Below is a picture of the frame I saw last week. The yellow circles are eggs that hatched into larvae. There is at least one other frame in the hive full of larvae too. Much bigger. I somehow missed seeing them last week.

Hatched eggs (and only one egg per cell) confirms we have a queen!



The purple circle in the picture above is a hive beetle. The bees were chasing it around the hive. I scooped it up with my hive tool and smashed it for them.

Apparently it's OK to have some hive beetles, as long as the colony is strong, they'll keep chasing them around and eventually out of the hive.

I had been wondering why the past two weeks the bees weren't drawing the wax in the 3rd new super I gave them.

As it turns out, they're drawing wax and festooning everywhere, hanging off the bottoms and in-between frames.


I had forgotten that I gave them 3 or 4 new deep frames of foundation as part of my annual "old comb removal" process. They've been working on drawing those out.

Also, almost every frame in the brood next is now empty of capped honey. The girls have moved almost all of it up into the supers to make room for their new queen to continue laying!

They've been busy making 5-10 queen cups here and there too. None of them had anything in them, but I removed them anyways.

One super is 100% capped, a second one is about 80%. In another week's time we should be ready to extract the two supers and put them back on the hive ready for the girls to fill up again.

I can't wait!