The bees have been in the hive more than a week now.
On Friday I had a bit of a gala to welcome them. It was an excellent time. Thanks for coming and thanks for bringing excellent food and drinks.
Saturday I inspected the hive to see how they’re building comb so far.
This is what the bees looked like when I opened the hive:
It was a bit rough, because the queen cage had caused the bees to build comb across a few of the bars instead of lined up with them nicely. First a shot of the empty queen cage.
Then on to the carnage. Here the sixth bar has been cut free from the diagonal combs, which are still connected to bars 4 & 5:
The top bars have a channel of wax running down the center of them so that the bees build the comb along the bars. When something causes the bees to build comb that doesn’t line up with the bars, the comb can normally be cut from the bar a little at the edges and straightened. I’m sure this works fine with comb that’s just curved due to being farther from the entrance, but the method (or my finesse) was not up to handling this soft new comb in this configuration.
Here’s the most hopeful point, with bars 4 & 5 separated from each other:
Unfortunately, neither of these bars had strong enough comb or connection left to survive straightening. I tied the biggest comb to the 4th bar and left the 5th bar’s comb on the bottom of the hive. I wasn’t confident that tying the comb back on was worth the time to find another piece of string. The bees should just chew it up and make new comb. Straighter hopefully.
Here’s the aftermath:
Comb images (mostly covered in bees) from the entrance back:
| 1 entrance | 
|
|---|---|
| 2 entrance | 
|
| 2 back |  |
| 3 entrance |  |
| 3 back |  |
| 4 entrance |  |
| 4 back |  |
| 6 back |  |
