Just like babies

So recently our family was blessed with this beautiful child.

To respect his privacy, I'll leave out any identifiers but he is gorgeous, isn't he? Ok, all that aside, I've mentioned to his mother that just when you think you know him and his routine, he'll change it and apparently bees are the same way.
Now this fact could be true for bees because they have a life cycle of about six weeks. This means that as soon as you get a grip on their personality, they've been replaced by another colony. My circuitous point is that the hive that was always the calmer hive (Jack's hive-the one that was re-queened) is now much more aggressive while my hive-which was so aggressive that I always left it for last-has calmed down to an amazing degree. The good news about that is that even the aggressive hive is calmer than its predecessor so I'm now down to a long-sleeved t-shirt instead of a sweatshirt!
The weather has been wonderful for the last few days-we missed the tornados that hit central Massachusetts on Tuesday-but instead had an impressive thunder and lightning storm. Nonetheless, the girls have been able to get out and are working like crazy which I discovered when I opened the hives and found that both  had consumed all of their sugar syrup. I'm hoping that the reason they're going through so much syrup is because both queens are laying like crazy and they need the syrup to supplement gathered nectar to feed the new bees. On that note, one thing that beekeepers have in common is large supplies of sugar in their pantries.

(shameless product placement-corporate sponsor, maybe?)

So out I went with another two gallons of a 1:1 sugar/water syrup and refilled both feeders.
Now, I have repeatedly been bothered by the number of bees who drown in the feeders despite the little wooden tracks. Then this week, my instructor had sent pictures of a hive where another beekeeper had addressed this problem with screening. I was searching for something that I could use for this purpose and had an "ah-ha" moment . I took the boxes the bees arrived in and removed their screens.

Then I cut the screens into strips and laid them on top of the slats with the following results.

Cool, huh? Hopefully it will help keep the bee death toll down.

Jack's hive is almost ready for another hive body and my hive may be a week or 10 days away from my adding a honey super. As I'd explained previously, each hive needs two hive bodies filled with comb and  honey for their winter use.  Once those bodies are built out, the honey super is added and any honey stored in there will be ours to harvest (and give as presents!). There is a piece of equipment called a queen excluder that is placed between the hive body and the honey super and it does as it's name suggests.

The slats are the right size for the worker bees to come through so they will build comb and fill it with honey. However, the queen is too large to make it through so their will be no eggs/larvae in the honey super and more importantly-in the honey.