Brian helps us out

We were lucky enough to have an experienced top-bar beekeeper come along to our hives early on Sunday morning.  Brian had visited the co-op in the early days to talk about beekeeping and was a wealth of information and enthusiasm.

We had a lot of questions but Brian was happy to dive straight in and inspect both hives. We started with Hive 1 - the bees were extremely lively and poured out of the Hive much more than we had seen before - poor Gil's hood/suit zip had broken, so he was relegated to watching from the sidelines - as we'd never seen them this reactive before.

We managed to get through about two-thirds of the combs before deciding that they were getting a bit too lively. We didn't find the Queen, but Brian was satisfied that there were definitely young brood present.

Hive 2 was totally different - there had obviously been no building activity at all since they were first returned. Brian & Steve managed to lift the whole clump of combs out, and all we could see was honeycomb. Brian was definitely of the opinion that they are Queen-less and have been for some time.

The level of cross-comb is clearly visible here - as is the small number of bees compared to hive 1. Brian left us with a number of the "prepared" top-bars that he uses to give the bees a start.

We then sealed up the hives, with the intention of increasing their level of insulation (with the weed membrane and kingspan). Brian then gave us a range of things we could do with the small hive - including ways of integrating them into the larger hive. Brian even gave us a very nice brand-new smoker !

Finally we took away some of the broken comb, and the comb they had built onto the feeder (which we also removed). So here's a picture of our very first "cut-comb"