On Monday Sue and I went up to Peck's Bee Supply to purchase wax foundations and some other supplies. Need to get another deep ready for the first hive!
On Tuesday I had to string wire on 10 deep frames and cleanup 10 others that were already wired. I had to drill out the sides for the grommets, but found that it was pretty easy to wire the foundations although it did take a little time. I wore my biking gloves to stretch the wire nice and taunt. Without the gloves the wire really dug into the skin! Forgot to take pictures of this process!
Next, I had to put wax foundations in the 20 frames. This also was pretty easy. By the time I got to the 20 frame, I was pretty slick at doing it! I did a little research online and found that you could use an electric transformer to heat the cross wires into the wax rather then using a tool to embed them. I first tried using a transformer that we had to run an electric toy train. Not enough juice to heat the wire! I next tried using a 12 volt car battery charger. It has 2 settings, 1.5 and 10 amp. The 10 amp setting worked best and would heat the wire in 5-10 seconds. After that amount of time, I removed the contacts and gently pressed the wax foundation into the heated wires. This process works great. Guess I should have taken a video of it!
After a had the frames ready to go, I went down to check my hives. On the original hive, the bees had drawn comb on most of the frames. The one outer frame was still untouched, so I swapped it with the one right aside of it. Since the book says you can have 2,000 new bees emerging every day, I thought it was time to put on a second deep hive body. I kept the entrance reducer on the small opening, but will probably move it to the larger opening sometime this week or next. I closed up the hive by putting the inner and outer cover on top of the new body.
While I was checking hives, I thought I'd see how the bees were doing in the new hive. They have nice comb drawn on about 4 or 5 frames, but I really didn't see and eggs or capped broad. Since I went thru this with the first hive, I thought I'd wait a week or two and check back before being worried that the queen isn't laying eggs.
I did take pictures when I checked the two hives, but they all turned out blurry! I accidentally had the camera on max zoom. It's a little hard handling the frames and taking pics at the same time. I did get a nice shot of my foot, but didn't think anyone would be interested in that.....
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