I am so far behind on my bee work that I am temporarily sold out of two-pound jars of our remarkable honey.

There’s plenty of honey out there in the field, but, really, I should get up at six am, not seven. I snuck a late afternoon peak into the bees last week. They do require attention from time to time, and casual observation from a distance can tell you if a hive has swarmed out and is in terminal decline or is overcrowded and needs more boxes with frames the young bees can build out. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found in the six hives I popped open for a quick veilless inspection.

I love it when the bees are so calm you don’t have to wear your protective clothing, and such was the case that last leisurely afternoon. One hive was gone and cleaned out, not a bee, not a lick of honey, raided out to the nook and cranny. What I found is what I suspected: eight to ten beautiful, elongated queen cells hanging open and hatched from the bottom of the frames, and this indicated to me this hive swarmed, and swarmed multiple times, with any number of new queens. In the end, there was not enough population left for the colony to defend itself. Wipe out.

On the opposite of the apiary, literally and figuratively, a hive consisting of a single deep was plastered with bees across the front of the box, just hanging there, trying to keep the hive cool by being outside on a hot day, and indicating to me that it was far past time to put on a second brood box. Killing two birds with one stone, I cleaned the frames from the empty swarmed-out colony and moved the refreshed box to the overcrowded colony. They were instantly relieved and today there are nearly no bees on the front of the hive. Of course, it’s about ten degrees cooler today, so there is that.

The other hives I checked also needed new frames, more space, even though they are still in nucleus boxes from the spring splits. A quick look revealed healthy brood and fresh white larvae and in one of them I was able to quickly find the queen, painted with a drop of red ink to indicate this year’s queen – a young one.

And then, of course, in the reveal of a nightmare, snapping open one large hive with a big brood box up top for honey collection, and planning forward to where I would take the next honey as soon as I take time, because you don’t have time, you take time, and there it was, what a mess.

For some reason now long lost to me, I put a large box, a brood box on top of this hive and in the brood box instead of the full-depth brood frames (which can be used for either the brood chamber or honey collection) I had somehow integrated the smaller, less deep frames usually reserved for the honey supers. That means the frames reached only half-way down the box, and the honey in those frames was beautiful and capped and ready for harvest just like I was looking for…’cept for one thing: they only went half way, and bees being bees they had built out the rest of the box with new comb following their own design, not the design of the fames, and the this new comb was full of honey too and beautiful and fat and not attached to anything removable or workable and I can’t really describe it. I closed the whole thing back up as quick as I could and said I would sleep on that, and sleep hasn’t helped much.

Up until recently the bees have been nasty and irritated by the smoky Canadian air, and now is their summer slow time, the time a dearth, after the spring rush of tree nectar flow, now over; and while waiting for the advent of the fall flow with purple loose strife and goldenrod, they hang. With the air clearing and the temps warm they have calmed down, as I noted, and even if not overcrowded the listless portion of their population will hang out on the front of the hive waiting for instructions, the right rains, the right flowers. Oh, to hang on a sweet summer’s day.