here comes the sun....

Finally! Some sun! Our girls are doing well. Many more have hatched. The queen is still working. Many more eggs have been layed and larvae in all stages. Lots of brood! YES! Alot more activity at the entrance, coming in with lots of pollen! Now we wait for the new bees to start drawing out the comb on those last few frames. Then we can put on the second brood box. Makes me very happy!
Know what else makes me happy? My new car...the Nissan Cube! Totally awesome. Very luxurious! And trusty assistant bought me new fancy hubcaps for my 'new rig'.

assistant in training

new bees!

We have babies! Here is our lovely Queen... she is on the far left. See how her body is longer than the others. Now in the other photo towards the bottom, the bees that are very light in color are the newly hatched bees. The first video shows the queen, she's the largest walking in the center of the screen. Now the other video is blurry, again. After we check on the girls, the weather turned cool and rainy. Sunday wasn't any better. I will try to get a better video next time. But, if you watch carefully towards the center right you will see a new bee hatching. The one of the bees that keeps stepping on her is also a newly hatched bee. Click on the photos to enlarge them.

brood capped over

The girls have capped the larvae. There are more eggs and larvae. Now we wait. Maybe Wed night if the weather is good we can check and see if any of the brood are hatching. We'll have new girls soon. The photo above right is the girls making a bridge between frames when we took out another frame. I need more practice with the videos. Might have to get a tri-pod.

in search of honey bees

These are some of the flowers on my walk route. There are large patches of them. Not a single honey bee to be found. I only saw bumble bees in the rhododendron bush.

larvae, oh yay!

Finally! We have larvae and more eggs! It looks like all different stages of larvae. The hive is weak. As I was trying to get the photo of the dark orange pollen on an incoming worker we saw two bees come out of the hive and die.
The bee inspector said we had some tracheal mites....
BUT we have had these bees with no replacements
since 4/26, 36 days. Now we have no idea how old they actually are. During honey flow they live 6 weeks.

here's Missy