Spring 09' has Sprung

Man am I glad Spring is finally here! Its actually been spring time for a few weeks now, but the weather has really improved this past week. The forecast looks 50+ and today we got to go out and took a peak! Both hives seem healthy but we lost the tree hive. I think I'm gonna keep it around for aesthetic value because it was a fun story. I decided to get a good scrapping of honey while we were inspecting them and put it in an empty plastic butter dish. The honey looks really dark, so I don't know what kind of honey it is, but it taste great! The wildflower honey I remember seeing/tasting from my mentors place was really light in color and tasted light too.. this was much more flavorful and creamy even.

I didn't see any brood but maybe its just too early for that. We only went two boxes deep so I did not look in the bottom box, I suspect that is where the majority of the bees and brood are at. In both hives they seemed to be building in only 1/4 of the boxes and going up. There were a few frames on the outside packed with sealed honey in both hives (middle box) but in the top boxes there were frames that didn't even have foundation drawn on them yet, completely blank. I suspect in a few weeks/months they will build up their colony and I'll have to put another box on but for now it seems like they got all the space they need.

From my rough estimation I think I'd be safe to take maybe 4 frames of sealed honey from both hives if I wanted to. I'm not going to yet, gunna have to ask some people at beemaster.com to find out for sure ... but I'd like to try to do the "crush and strain" method of honey collection first...so I'm excited to do that soon.

Today was great, after the inspection allot of the bees followed us to the garage area and our dogs were playing with them. Everyone seemed to have a good time..bees getting the little drops of honey from my gloves and on the ground were focused on that so we could take lots of pictures. While they were busy doing that we decided to practice MARKING so we captured a few and tried it out. Someday I'll have to start keeping track of queens ^^