Oregon spring, rain, shine, wind, rain, hail, shine. What a frustrating week of not being able to peek inside the hives when the weather has been warm & calm enough for 15 minutes, only to be ready to look and have it pouring....again.

That's life, but I just knew those busy bees would be encasing the queen cages in honeycomb. The queen cage is hung off a top bar and removed, theoretically, after the queen has eaten her way through the candy plug, but before serious honeycomb construction is underway.

Yesterday was just warm enough and calm enough around noon to finally take a gander. The situation was tenuous as the bright sun would disappear behind cloud and a breeze would spring up from nowhere, then bright sun again. But I was determined.

The bees were flying and I saw pollen on them going into my hive. Surely that meant a queen was laying brood eggs. Dan lifted the lid with me and I moved the baffle back to peek under the top bars. To my wonder, there was new comb shiny and white to look at. Unfortunately, it was running diagonally across the bars! The weather was just unsettled enough that I didn't want to disturb them further. I assumed a queen was in there doing her job & replaced the roof.

Hive two is at the Reach Center and owner, Charlie McGee, and I opened that hive. I nervously moved back the baffle. These bees were clearly more reasonable as their comb was being constructed exactly as it should be along the top bars. I pulled a couple out along with chaining bees. Bees form long chains that help them construct the comb in perfect geometric shape.

We saw honey in the cells, and the queen cage was imbedded. We gently pulled it out. No queen inside. These bees were also hauling in pollen, so I again assumed brood must be in there somewhere.

Hive three was Robert's warre box. I felt I was getting just a little facility with this and, so far, things were going well. Again, we saw pollen going into the hive. I remembered to spray sugar water on these bees & it calmed them visibly. We pried up several top bars & removed the queen cage. Most of the comb was being filled with honey, but the last bar had darker comb on it. Could that be brood comb? I didn't know. We closed the hive and went to check the last one.

Erik's hive is also a warre. It looked almost identical to what we saw in Robert's. On my fourth hive of the afternoon I was calmer. I remembered to spray the bees with sugar, quietly pried up bars, we got the empty queen cage out, and the last bar again had the dark comb. This time, I looked at it carefully & saw eggs in the bottom of the cells. Ureka! Brood!

I'm itching to open the first two hives again, but I'll wait until next week and a warmer day. So far, so good.

All four hives have been fed sugar water for nearly two weeks. I'll discontinue feeding my two hives now that I see honey on board and there are so many trees, shrubs and herbs blooming. So far, so good, and so diagonal, whatever, all is well.