We did our first inspection today while we were moving our hive to their forever home!

We were anxiously looking for to find the now 2 week old queen in the hive, however we didn’t manage to see her. She’ll survive another week or two without being painted blue ;P . I didn’t manage to see any eggs, however I kind of forgot to look for them because I was too busy trying to spot her on our well and truely crowded frames. There was definitely larva present of varying sizes, so we’re not too worried about her, yet. We were carefuly that she wasn’t left in the nucleus or fell on the ground. Unfortunately, we spotted a few about half a dozen small hive beetles in the hive, so we’ll have to go get a beetle trap.

Overall, the hive was pretty much overflowing, as you can see in the below picture. We did this at approximately 1:30pm on a 32°C day.

Compared to the one established hive that I’ve inspected before, I was not expecting this! There were a LOT of bees. I think the timing of moving to them to their new hive box was perfect, they looked like they were about to burst from the box. Pulling out the frames, it was incredibly hard to focus exactly on what was happening in the hive. We started looking for the queen, wanting to mark her but failed to see her at all. Stupidly, we should have taken photos of the frames, and had a look afterwards, and also shared them here, but we were too excited about getting to see our bees for the first time :D!

We came back a few hours later and put some probably a cup of 1:1 sugar syrup in a zip-lock bag (with a hole in it) on the hive mat at the top to help them with drawing out the foundation of the new frames. It likely won’t last them very long, but it’s a start.

We’re planning on purchasing a proper syrup feeder and a beetle trap as soon as possible. We’ll likely end up doing another inspection next weekend, just to see if they’re expanded out the box yet and install the trap and feeder. If so, we’ll add another brood box on and let them go for it!

As an added note, I’ve been setting up a remote combined temperature and humidity monitor for the hive over the past month or two. The box we installed has a single temperature sensor at the bottom center of the hive, and more will be added when the next box is added too. I’m in the process of motivating myself to write up the details in another post. I’ll try to go through the bare essentials, if anybody else wants to try to set this up for themselves, as it’s likely going to be low-cost. I had to spend extra money on things to getting here in time before we were to place the first box, so someone who plans ahead should be able to get things done relatively cheaply.