Feedin' and hopin'

Seems like I am doing OK at the present as a beekeeper, but not so well as a blogger.

In the last month we had a little run-in with the mosquito sprayers. I had just returned to the house with empty sugar water jars when I heard the plane fly directly over my house. I went out to the hives and added a little cover, but you could already taste the pesticide in the air. I left them alone until the next day and found piles of bees outside each hive :( The next day I went back out and the bees had cleaned up their dead and I put on full feeders.

Last weekend I went back in for a full inspection and things looked amazingly well. There was brood and honey in good quantities across the hives. Of course hive 4 was still smaller, I am not sure exactly what to do with these guys. I checked the syrup jars this afternoon and found that Hive 2 was empty while Hive 1 was full - no clue. Hive 3's jar had clogged to I unclogged it. Hive four had only taken about a third of their syrup. It is amazing how different they are.

That's all for now.