First Full Inspection

3rd Inspection (almost four weeks from installation): 8:30 pm, sun setting,

Clear skies, weather still warm from hot temperature day.

We went out to examine the comb we missed last week and to see how many bars had comb. The sugar syrup was almost empty and we replaced it with a new jar of 1:1 and three tiny holes in the lid. The bees took 10 days to go through the last jar - which may have been too long for the same syrup to sit in the hive. The substitute pollen patty was still untouched. I don't know whether it is better to take it out or leave it in - I left it in. The smoker only went out once this time around, despite working with the bees for 30 minutes.

This time around we used a crowbar to shift all the bars back about half an inch, so that I would have some room to set the bars back in without loosing lives. Although I started with bar #5 and moved back to bar #9 and then decided to see the bars from last week too, I went ahead and put the photos here in the order they are in the hive.

Bar #1 (front/back): 

Bars #2-#3 (last week/this week) 

Bar #4 (front/back) 

Bar #5 (last week/this week) 

Bar #6 (front/back) 

Bar #7 (front/back) 

Bar #8 (front/back) 

Bar #9 (just beginning) 

We could see that many of the capped brood comb had been open, but the drone comb was still capped. We could also see more darker bees than before. As I closed up the hive I needed my handyman husband to help shove the comb tightly together. He stepped in to help, again, unprotected, and received his second and third stings. This time he accidentally squeezed the venom into his skin while trying to remove the stinger and ended up causing himself quite a bit of pain, enough that he doesn't want it to happen again.

We still have yet to find that elusive queen. We'll spend some time examining our photos, but it's not to critical as it appears she is doing a good job.