Way back on April 25th…yes, I’ve got a backlog of photos…please forgive me! We pulled the honeybee packages out of our new hives. We received our honeybees on April 15th, and general practice is to let the packages rest in the hive for 7-9 days so that the honeybees can accept their Queen and start making honeycomb. Due to some inclement weather, we had to wait a little longer than we wanted to, which meant that honeybees started to build some “rouge comb.”

Here you can see The Renaissance Man scraping off some of that “rogue comb” with his hive tool.

We then pulled each of the packages out of their respective hives so we could add in the empty frames for the honeybees to start building on. You notice the drips of honey running down the side of the package, these bees had already started to fill some of the “rouge comb” with honey.

Because we didn’t get to the honeybees soon enough, they actually had built quite a bit of comb that needed to be removed from the hive. This comb is removed because it hasn’t been built on a frame, but instead has been “free built” by the honeybees in whatever pattern they like.

Here is all of the “rouge comb” that was cut out of our first hive. Each of the following three hives had about the same amount of comb that had to be cut out of the hive before inserting empty hive frames.

And here is a reminder of what an empty hive frame looks like. It’s basically a wooden frame that has a wax insert pattern on it that the honeybees then build comb from…this keeps the hive nice and clean and allows beekeepers to easily move frames around inside the hive without crushing honeycomb. I’m always amazed at how fragile the honeycomb is, for being wax it’s quite brittle.

As I started to take a closer look at the comb that we had to cut out, I realized that quite a bit of it had honeybee larvae…total bummer. This means that instead of having new bees in about a week, we lost a batch of new honeybees because we had to cut out this comb. The good news is that our honeybees have a healthy Queen who’s laying eggs. Can you see the little larvae curled up inside of the honeycomb?

After The Renaissance Man pulled the package out of his hive, I went to work on my yellow hives doing the same thing. Each of my hives are healthy and active! The white hive in between the two yellow hives is the swarm that we caught! Those bees are also active and healthy with a Queen that is laying eggs!

So many happy honeybees!