It had been two weeks since the second package install, so it was time to check on things. I was in for a surprise, but dad had given me a bit of a preview. The good news was that the bees seemed to have some comb built, and there were eggs in the comb. The bad news was that NONE of the frames had been built on. ALL the comb had been built in hive top feeder... attached to the inner cover. See the pictures for the detail. Anyway, my solution was to remove enough comb so that I could get the cover onto the top of the deep hive body.... with as many frames in the box as possible. In this way, hopefully the bees will start drawing out the comb on the frames... and I can get rid of the other pieces of comb later. I'll chalk this up to a rookie mistake of putting the hive top feeder on way too soon... and not using newspaper to prevent them building in the space in the feeder. Note that in the pictures the comb is only built on one half of the hive cover. This is because the hive top feeder is split into two sections. I removed 4 of the deep hive body frames to accommodate the existing comb.
The other (first) hive seemed to be doing well... and I was able to locate the queen. I did see some queen cups, and a supersedure cell... but it seems way too early to start worrying about swarms just yet. Besides, I have a honey super on this hive, so the bees can't complain that there isn't enough room to expand. I tried the powdered sugar dusting to help the bees combat veroa mites. In a previous inspection, I had seen a couple bees with deformed wings... which the books say is associated with a Varoa infestation. Hopefully the sugar dusting helped.
