I’ve been pressing my husband a.k.a. The Renaissance Man to name the hives. We’ve had them for about a month now, and not having names was starting to bother me. I was tired of saying, “You know that hive on the left was really active today” or “The hive on the right had lots of bees sitting on the porch.” In an effort to move the process along, I proposed that we name the hives Pinot Noir (the left hive) and Pinot Gris (the right hive). To my surprise, The Renaissance Man agreed, but wanted to shorten things up, and so we settle on “Noir” and “Gris.”

It’s a nod to wine country, and I’d like to think it describes the hives pretty well. Noir is the busy hive! Lots and lots of bees that are constantly working away and zoom in and out of the hive with speed and a mission. Whereas Gris, is more laid back. The bees meander in and out of the hive often resting on the porch before they enter and leave. And being the competitive sports fan that I am, I’m rooting for Gris! Everyone loves a good underdog!

It had been about a week or so since we removed the honeybee kits and inserted the spare frames. The Renaissance Man wanted to check out the hives and see if we needed to add another brood box. Making sure to smoke the honeybees first, we opened up Gris.

And then it was time to check the frames. The Gris hive as I’ve mentioned above isn’t nearly as active. The Renaissance Man thinks its because quite a few the bees in the bee kit were dead when we got them, which in turn has put the hive a bit behind Noir in the total number of bees. I just think they’re a bit less motivated. At any rate, the frames near the middle of the box are starting to fill up!

The Gris hive still had empty frames where the bees haven’t started to build comb, so we decided to leave that hive as is and monitor its growth over the next several weeks.

Now the Noir hive has been busy! I could tell as soon as we took off the roof that this hive has a much larger population.

Just look at how much more is going on in the frames. You can see pollen (the black dots), and the light yellow cells are filled with brood (new baby bees).

Given the growth of Noir we decided to add an additional brood box so that the bees have plenty of room to grow. We’d hate to have the bees swarm at this point since they’re just getting going in our hives. Bees will swarm when they feel like they don’t have enough room to grow in their current hive.

To finish up, we gave each hive additional pollen patties (protein) and I set up a water feeder for the bees. I saw the water feeder on Pinterest and thought it was a good idea. Bees need water too, and if you don’t put something in the tray of water like rocks or marbles, the bees can drown while trying to get a drink.

And now we wait. I’m getting good at waiting on the bees! It’ll give me some time to come up with a crafty way to make a name sign for each hive.

And one parting thought, you’ll notice in the first picture of this post that both hives are oriented the same direction. When you have hives close together you need to rotate the hives so that the bees from each hive know which bee box is their own. Bees don’t go into other hives and by rotating Gris to the right a bit, we provide enough difference that the bees know which home they belong too. Pretty neat huh?