Now don’t go fainting or anything but…

We actually inspected the hives!  I know, right??

And, by “we”, I mean Steve & Charlie.  We were coming back from town last night and I said, “You know, we really should take a look in the hives tonight.  The MVBA meeting is tomorrow and I’d hate to be lame enough to have no hive report two months in a row.  So, yeah, we should do at least a quick inspection once we get home.”  After using my wifely wiles of wonderment, Steve eagerly offered to be Charlie’s assistant.

Charlie’s swarm, pictured above is doing great, at least by our admittedly low standards.  (Our standards = alive and not completely pathetic = great.)  Two boxes of brood and just over a half super of honey.

Fred, the old Italian hive, is also doing well, with two deep brood boxes bursting at the seams. We added a medium super to it and should have done that long ago.

Next up was that big cutout we did this summer.  It’s doing okay but had one box more than it needed, apparently.  We found evidence of wax moths and took off the unneeded super.  That puts them down to two brood boxes.

Last of the remaining hives is Hans Hubermann.  It’s still in just one brood box but could have used a second a while back, it seems.  We added that so they’ll have a bit more elbow room.  Maybe with the recent rains — and a few more hopefully coming — they’ll end up with some stores for winter.

All other bees we had are gone, except maybe one or two from smaller swarms that combined with other hives.  But you know what?  We are now at four decent hives that just might have a shot at making it through the winter  That’s twice what we went into last winter with.  Gotta look at the bright side, right?