Inspection time

Monday April 23, 2012: the day of my first inspection. I went back to work for the first time since spring break. My day was mild and kind of nice. I enjoy routine and I missed all of my students. (I don't think many of them missed me)

Just as an aside to beekeeping, I teach at an inner city magnet school. I teach 3 freshmen world history classes and 2 senior psychology classes. I love my students and really enjoy my job. There are days when the long hours, disrespectful students, and difficult working environment becomes really taxing but all in all I love my job. I have been sharing some things about my bees with my students and they love hearing about it. Maybe they are only pretending because I'm not talking about history. :)

After school I get in the truck and drove out to Acorn hill. When I got there I fired up the smoker and headed out to the hive. So far this has been my most positive bee experience. I slowly and meaningfully open up the hive and pull out all of the frames that have bees on them. I really take my time and try to hunt down my missing queen. There is no sign of her. Although she may have just been hiding. A big sign to me that she hadn't returned was a whole bunch of bees fanning on the front porch. The bees do this by lifting the rear ends in the air and flap their wings. It is a cool sight. They do this to spread their smell in the air to attract the bees that are out foraging. Although because it was another gloomy drizzly day I think they were fanning for the queen to return.

Bees eating left over queen candy and doing some fanning

These signs led me to call Nick the guy from Boston. He was really nice and after I explained what was going on he assured me this kind of thing was not crazy uncommon. We agreed that I would come up on Tuesday and pick up another marked queen for 23 bucks. I was really happy they even had a queen because I had looked around and couldn't find another source on the internet.

I'll have to tell you my first experience holding frames full of bees up in the air and looking at them, was awesome! I mean hundreds of bees are cool looking and again no stings. I am going to have to get a second veil so I can have someone take pictures of my next inspection.