I Had an Excuse, sort of...

It has been two whole weeks since I have even looked at my hives. I couldn't find my smoker, seriously, I couldn't. I needed it to display at my presentation for the historical society tonight. I couldn't find it anywhere at home, I surely must have left it by the hives, right? I know we have a field day in two days, but I wanted to find my smoker - or maybe I just wanted to say hi to my hives! Yes, I admit, I grabbed my beesuit and my hive tool - just to find my smoker, of course. My first happy sight upon coming up to the lane by my bees was the giant basswood tree dangling profuse spent blooms right over the lane just feet from the hives. That meant that sometime in the past two weeks there was lots to feast on nearby. How could I possible not look to see? Especially since I just happened to have my beesuit with me! I only opened the top of the long white hive, I didn't pull any frames. It looked good, covering around 11 frames, which is great. I took the top of the vertical hive next to it. It had good traffic. It hadn't done anything with the top box, but I will have to wait until Saturday to see what has been done below, when someone can lift for me. Next, I peeked into the littlest new hive to see how it was doing. It is still small, so we will add some frames of bees to help it out on Saturday. Last, I saved the best. The long blue hive had tons of bees at the entrance still. Two weeks ago I gave it three empty frames behind the brood nest. Today I moved FOUR absolutely full to bursting capped frames of honey back from the brood nest and put four empty frames in their place. Those are new from empty, foundationless frames two weeks ago. That is extremely exciting to me! In the picture below, the green circle is around the four absolutely full frames of honey. The orange circle is around the four empty frames I added between the brood and the honey.