Derm Dad is a real beekeeper now! He still hasn’t been stung.

So, you’re in for a real treat today because we opened up the hive and took pictures of the bees’ progress from above the comb grid! But first, some pics from the windows – the perspective you are used to seeing around here.

In November, things look pretty desolate around here. The leaves are 90% off the trees, but there are a few green things hanging on. We even have a few blooms on our flowers in the front yard (butterfly bush and salvia).

And yet, we have bees bringing in pollen!

So, here’s the top of the comb grid. I was so surprised that the bees hadn’t built their comb along the bars in the comb grid. It’s almost like they just built in between the grids, with just a few holes for access.

This really blew my mind! The bees chewed/licked/sanded/dug out the wood to give themselves better access through the upper entrance. When Kent built it, the opening was a rectangle.

Adele decided to take a few pictures too.  I was wiping some debris off the boards that were in the top part of the hive – some pincher bugs had taken up residence.  

So, my beekeeping mentor checked out the hive and said that everything looks good (no sign of hive beetles, varoa mites, or any other bad stuff). We put some really raw honey in a quart mason jar with a few very small holes in the lid.We set it on a few shims and inverted it on top of the comb grid, with the hive lid directly on top of that.

This is before we added the shims, but you get the idea.

Just a note on feeding bees. I think it is not good practice to feed bees sugar syrup or anything made with high-fructose corn syrup because the nutritional value to is so inferior to honey. They’re called honey bees, not sugar bees! And, it’s dangerous to purchase honey from the store because it could be infested with spores of something dangerous that you don’t want to introduce to your hive. And, you can’t even trust a label that says “raw” because you can legally heat honey up to to a certain temp and still label it as raw. Unbelievable, I know. But then again, the FDA has zero credibility with me, so I can believe it. We were blessed to get some really raw honey from a beekeeping friend of mine in California. Why, yes, I did bring a four gallon bucket of honey home on the airplane. =)