Spot Check

While I know I'm supposed to give my bee's some time to settle in I just couldn't resist peeking in on them.  I was also slightly worried about them I didn't close off the screened bottom board and it was quite a storm last night.  I figured I could keep myself occupied by just observing them and guessing what was going on.  As you can see there's plenty of action with the little girls zooming in and out of the hive.

I'm not sure why I didn't get a shot of the second hive other than they're running a bit behind and only had 4 girls sitting on the porch, and a goofy guy appearing to have navigation issues.  I watched him try and take off and then crash back into their little party.  Then wander around wondering where he went wrong.  After about 10 minutes he finally figured out what he was doing and flew off to the bachelor's pad to spend the day drinking and and waiting for the girls to show up.

I figured to keep myself out of the hive's I'd try stalking them for a while.  Which was quite a bit of fun.  Now I keep spotting them everywhere, on the weeds:

Also on my new flowers that I forgot I planted if I'd only remembered to turn the time stamp off this would have been a great picture.

After a while of stalking the girls I gave in and decided to take just a quick peek in the hives and I noticed everyone seems to be doing just fine.  On the small hive I decided not to pull any of the frames because they've still got a lot of work to do to catch up.  On the larger hive I pulled 2 frames because they were a lot noisier and I thought maybe I had rolled the queen yesterday in my haste to install them.  Here's a quick shot of the brood nest they're really going to town plenty of capped brood and still a few eggs around the edge and if I saw correctly just a few uncapped larva.

I found the queen on the second frame but she wouldn't co-operate for a photo shoot, there has to be a trick to holding the frame and getting photos but I don't have those skills yet.  After confirming no one suffered from last nights storm I closed them back up and will let them be except for a quick change tomorrow.

My mentor wasn't able to make it out today and pointed out I had made a slight mistake in my installation.  I must have missed this in all the videos I watched but apparently you're supposed to put the nuc frames in the center of the hive, with empty frames on either side of them.  The reason for this is they will only work on the frames closest to the brood, if you have everything on one side it will take them longer to draw out the other frames.  So tomorrow I plan to do a very quick entry and just shift the frames down so I can have undrawn foundation on either side of the brood.

Hopefully by tomorrow I can also figure out my second conundrum.  I had planned on running a foundation less hive and a hive with foundation.  The problem is I thought I was getting medium nuc's however they were deep nuc's so I've had to run both hives with foundation as both my deeps were setup to be the foundation hives.  I'll have to figure out if I'll just leave it as is and maybe pop the foundation out of the frames and just go foundation less on the deep of one or leave the foundation and see what comes of it.  Then once they have one of the hive bodies filled in and started on a second hive body I can maybe do some trickery with the queen excluder to get them swapped over to mediums and then the medium will be foundation less.