Hive Inspection (April 27, 2019)

Today I did a quick hive inspection just to see how the girls were coming along. The first photo shows bees on the top brood box (we run what is known as a “double deep” hive configuration, meaning that there are two deep boxes that have brood in them) and the supers where the bees are to store the honey rest on top of those. As you can see at the right of the first picture, there is what is called a “queen excluder.” This is traditionally placed between the two brood boxes where the girls raise baby and where they store honey. The screen is just large enough for worker bees to fit through but is to small for the queen to fit through, thereby “excluding” her from the honey supers. The idea is to keep the queen down in the brood boxes so she doesn’t lay eggs in the honey boxes.