Now To Look Into The Hive

Setting down the smoker and ready to open the hive to see if the Queen ate her way out of her shipping container. Note bare hands to this point in going into the hive.

After putting on leather gloves Carol removes the inner hive cover to access the starter-feeder.

The starter-feeder, with sugar-water used to feed the colony while it is new and foraging not yet firmly established, is now being removed.

With the starter-feeder tray removed, the foundation-frames - with lots of bees - are visible. The bluish tag is attached to the queen container - which when inserted at hive set-up time caused the wider than normal frame spacing.

The small queen-shipping container, shown upper right with worker bees crawling over it, was empty and the queen is somewhere among the foundation frames - hopefully laying eggs and increasing the colony's supply of worker bees for the summer months ahead.