Hive Visit: June 27

What a difference a week makes; especially a week of hot sunny weather. I’ve gone from worrying about underfed, underperforming hives, to worrying that I might get harvestable honey before I’m ready to deal with it. The hives are filling up, and there is plenty of bee activity which I will hopefully be showing in a posted video soon.

Hive A
Hive A is healthy and strong. I was sweating like crazy in the heat, so I didn’t bother lifting off the top box to gain access to the bottom. But the top box has wax comb on 6 frames, and those 6 are filling up steadily with brood and honey. Everything looks great… except for my flagrant screw up of not pushing the frames tightly together. This mistakes has caused an absolute mess of free-form comb building. The upside is that I had to scrape out this wild comb and was able to eat some sweet sweet honey. Below you can see a nice clean sheet of fresh comb – this is not the frame I buggered up.

Hive B
Hive B has taken off like a rocket. The top box was heavy enough that I could have easily thrown my back out. The picture at the top of this post is some great looking brood from the top box of Hive B. And below is the top view of the top box. Lots of bees! All but two frames are covered in wax. This means Hive B is cut off from sugar syrup, and in exchange gets a “honey super” (an extra box in which to store the honey I will be stealing later). Also good news for Hive A, as they received a double dose of feed this week – maybe Queen Latifah can finally catch up with Elizabeth.
Treatments and Feedings
Hive B gets nothing but a honey super with framed foundation.
Hive A gets all the syrup this week – over 4 litres of 2:1 syrup – let’s see if they can drink the whole works.

To Do List
Order some more supers.

Thoughts
The problem with the wild comb building in Hive A has me thinking about the role of the CEO in a large corporation. I have a staff of roughly 50,000 bees now, and let’s not kid ourselves, they do most of the work. But I make a lot of decisions and consequently, a lot of mistakes. In fact, you could say that all the mistakes are mine and the bees just respond to the conditions to which I subject them. A small slip-up on my part led to significant wasted effort on the part of the bees, and I had to tear down some of their hard work. While the bees got busy fixing my mistake, my girlfriend and I sat in the shade eating the honeycomb I had been forced to remove.

I screw up. My team suffers. They fix the mistake. I eat honey.

Being a CEO is awesome.