Early June Inspection

I first checked the nuc today to see if there was any sign yet of a queen cell from the frames I put in on May 23rd.  There clearly seems to be at least one queen cell, which would be approximately two weeks old.  It is in the photo below, but a little group of nurse bees kept covering it, lending credence to the likelihood that it contains a queen.

I contemplated adding another frame from one of the other hives, but I think I'll do a wait-and-see here.

I checked hive #2, the stronger of the other hives, to see how they had progressed during our week away to northern Minnesota.  I had anticipated possibly needing to add a second super.  The bees have been building comb and adding some nectar but no frames full of honey yet.  I looked deeper into the hive and found the top hive body (of 3) is almost totally full of honey, most capped.  It's quite heavy.  I began to be worried that the hive was getting honeybound, so looked deeper.  The middle box has a lot of ugly frames, and I need to do some work in there sometime after the honey flow, but I did find a couple frames filled with capped worker cells, so I'm not as concerned about that.  I think they have just been filling up the top hive body and hopefully next will move on up and work hard on the honey super.  Clover is still going very strong, and we have a lot of it on our 3 acres plus the large horse pasture behind us.

Hive #1 also has done little on the super, but the number of bees there has really increased.  I didn't bother them a lot.

Hive #2  A lot of bees, hasn't swarmed to my knowledge.

While in N. Minnesota, Hackensack to be specific, we stopped in at Mann Lake.  I bought two hive bodies and 20 frames.  I just felt I needed to have a little extra on hand in case we needed to do a split or something.  Always enjoy stopping there.