(Already) Getting Ready for Fall
Last weekend, Minnesota weather was fully hot. We have been keeping only an occasional eye on our hives the last couple of weeks, but we decided it was the time to start getting the hives ready for the end of the season. The hive that is right-most in the photo above is the first one we inspected and evaluated, and you can see a frame from it below. This sporadic and bumpy pattern makes it look like the worker bees are laying eggs. This is bad because there should be an efficiently-laying queen to make more worker bees. When a worker or workers start laying eggs, only drones (male bees) are produced, and the hive is doomed because there will be no more workers to stock up honey for the cold season. This hive will not make it through winter, so we took the honey frames off of the top and set them aside for harvesting. We also put some of the frames that these girls had started with comb and uncured honey and put them on the center hive, so...