In the last couple weeks the weather has warmed up to give us some remarkably hot sunny days.
On june 25 there was so much activity at the hive, I decided to put a super on just in case they needed some storage room. I had previously gotten all the burr/wax off of the excluder so I put it on under the super. The top deep box wasn't totally full, but I thought it would be ok to put a little more room on top anyway.
Today I just took the lid off and peeked into the top, because I was dying to know if they had put any honey in there. There was only one frame (track side #1, the white plastic one) about half full of honey. Otherwise, not much going on in the super, except for one frame w/ foundation had been drawn out a little in the middle.
Looking down through to the deep box beneath, it was wall to wall bees, I mean really full -and they seem to have managed to put back a lot of the wax/burr I had labored to remove from the excluder.
About the drones: I am wondering if there are a lot of drones because I put starter strips intosome of the frames in the blue brood box. There wasnt enough foundation to go around so I cut a sheet into 2 -3 inch strips and put them in the last couple frames when I realized I was running out. I have read mention of people using starter strips having an issue with bees making bigger sized cells resulting in drones - but im pretty sure I put those starter strip frames in the outsides of the box. I foolishly didnt note anything down about that at the time.
I tried to be as unobtrusive as possible today so that it wouldn't be a problem to do a more thorough inspection in a couple days. If there is still a frame with a lot of drone cells maybe it could be removed and replaced with some fresh foundation? Anyway, im sure the queen is still laying just fine because the worker population has dramatically increased in the last little bit.
More later
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