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Hive inspection-bee population exploded.
While inspecting my second top bar hive yesterday I found a large amount of bees on the underside of the screened bottom. I opened up the hive and wow! My follower board is not bee tight (which I found to be useful) and there was a larger than normal amount of bees on the wrong side. Normally I have only a few bees trying to remove dead bees in this area.
I moved the follower board back and found a hive packed full of bees. Last weekend they had 3 new bars to build on and still needed to finish out a few combs.
The other hive is still slow going.
Below are some photos of two of my top bar hives and the field they are located in.
A piece of my starter strip can be seen in this photo that was broken off.
I basically had an explosion in the bee population that I wasn't expecting. This hive is doing better than I expected and I need to pay more attention to it.
While inspecting my second top bar hive yesterday I found a large amount of bees on the underside of the screened bottom. I opened up the hive and wow! My follower board is not bee tight (which I found to be useful) and there was a larger than normal amount of bees on the wrong side. Normally I have only a few bees trying to remove dead bees in this area.
I moved the follower board back and found a hive packed full of bees. Last weekend they had 3 new bars to build on and still needed to finish out a few combs.
The other hive is still slow going.
Below are some photos of two of my top bar hives and the field they are located in.



A piece of my starter strip can be seen in this photo that was broken off.

I basically had an explosion in the bee population that I wasn't expecting. This hive is doing better than I expected and I need to pay more attention to it.