Adventures in Beekeeping: 3rd Inspection

Its been 2 months since I started my beekeeping adventure with my 3 friends from class. However, I have been behind with blogging about it. Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging, I wish I had more time to update this blog more frequently.  Our hives are located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and despite it's urban location, the neighborhood is full of flora. The residents in this neighborhood are pretty serious about their gardening.

For example, this gorgeous rose bush is just a block from the hives. Stunning, right?

There has been so much activity at the hives. Here's a post about our 3rd bee inspection that happened on May 6th. These are photos of my beekeeping partners, Victoria in the white dome veil and Paul in the black veil.  In these photos, they are smoking the hive to get it ready for the frame inspection. In the last photo is Paul looking at the frame to check for healthy signs of wax, brood and pollen. 

The worker bees have been extremely busy with building brood wax comb for the frames. Brood are bee egg embryos. The Queen lays one egg per honeycomb cell. Within the frames, we are seeing lots of pollen and brood. The Queen has been extremely active with laying her eggs. A very good sign that the hive is healthy.

As I mentioned in previous posts, we maintain two beehives.  One in a backyard and one on  a rooftop.  Here is the one on the rooftop. In this photo, we saw that there were lots of bees returning to the hive after foraging for pollen. I love watching the bees flying back to the hive.  I can watch this for hours.

We took the cover off the hive and saw lots of bees on top of the frames.  Some were eating the pollen patty of food.  The pollen patty is full of nutrients for this young hive to feed on.

Here is a closeup of the top of the hive.

Paul pulling a frame out to inspect.

A closeup of the frame.  Here you can really see the capped brood.  And the pollen!

I love this photo. It really shows how many bees are flying all around us.

When we open the hive and inspect the frames, many of the bees fly out.  Then they all try to come back into the hive, here they are all bearded in front of the entrance.

And a closeup of the bearding!

After we were done with the inspection, we closed the cover. Then all of the sudden, Paul says, "Victoria, DO NOT MOVE!"

A bunch of bees had landed on her bottom.  Wowsers!  We took the bee brush and brushed the bees off! Thank goodness she did not sit down before we saw the bees on her!

After we left the beehives, this gorgeous flowering bush stopped me in my tracks. This is down the street from the hives.  How gorgeous is this plant?  I don't know the name of it.  But would love to find out.  Do you know what type of flower this is?  It's lovely!  I'm so happy that the bees have flowers like this to forage on!