Orange: The super remained uncapped. I am not sure if the bees are making much headway to filling it up with honey. There was a green plastic drone frame with capped drone that I removed and replaced with bare foundation. The chickens did manage to pick off the brood from the plastic foundation, but its messy and I think I do prefer just using frames that the bees build their own drone frame in.
I did dust this hive with powdered sugar.
Purple: As you can see in the picture, the bees are not drawing out the foundation in the super. There was also a drone frame that had some capped brood, so I cut it out and slipped it back into place. The chickens also enjoyed them as well. I then dusted this hive.
Green: I decided to add another super to this hive. I had medium frames ready to go but only a shallow box, so I used a spacer (normally used to put on top of the hive under the inner cover to provide room for pollen patties and certain medication treatments) underneath the new super to allow enough space for the medium frames to fit. I will want to replace this soon with a proper medium box.
There was a lot of activity while I was doing this work. I believe the reason was that since this hive uses its top entrances so heavily, the foragers were coming back and didn't know where to go when I had the top super off. I may think about what to do in the future to keep them happy. I might try placing the top boxes on a neighboring hive to see if that will make them happy or not.
I dusted this hive.
Swarm/Dark Green: The bees had built some comb upwards into the empty space in the old box. I removed both the extra comb and the empty top box.
Blue: There was some activity on in the second super, I need to add more frames next time. In the top deep, there was a drone frame inside which was completely drawn out with large drone sized cells, but there was only a handful of brood inside, all of which were capped. Evidently the bees are ramping down on production of drones as the season progresses. I removed the few cells of brood and put the frame back in.
Red: Did not open.
Yellow: The bees are not using all of the top box yet. Dusted.
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