Lucky 7

Today my wonderful mentor stopped by for another hive inspection. It was foggy and quite cool. (I’m sharing the weather report in an attempt to excuse the behavior of the bees, who ungraciously stung him six times… He’s the kind of natural beekeeper I aspire to be–he only uses a veil, no gloves or bee suit. But today didn’t offer much incentive to change my haz-mat approach.)

I’m so happy to report that everything’s going really well. We spotted Latifah in the middle brood box. The whole brood area was doing nicely–lots of eggs, larvae, and capped brood, but still room for more. It looks like three medium boxes is the perfect number for us, allowing for rotation of space through the frames, as needed, for egg laying and brood raising.

Above the queen excluder, the three supers have been filled beautifully. In about a week, I think we’ll have two supers to extract. That means the rush is on to buy jars, design labels, and, surprisingly, buy and build another super and frames. Yes, the hive’s going to be seven boxes tall. Please join me in thinking stable thoughts.

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