Gangbuster!

Our fuzzy bugs are going gangbuster - that's really the only way to describe their activity level. Seriously! There is no stopping them from drawing comb, raising baby bees and loading up on pollen and nectar to feed everybody and hoard for the coming winter.

Heh, that one cracks me up. If they only knew. Our girls are from Minnesota and are probably expecting massive snowfall and months with temperatures below freezing. Man, are they going to be in for a surprise.

Ahh, sunny Florida. Living here has its perks.

We try to inspect our hive every other week but because the weather had been hot, humid and Hordor! , I mean, wrought with thunderstorms, we missed one. That taught us that our girls aren't to be trusted to stay in line. Since they had an extra week of unsupervised activity, they came up with a few small, but crazy cross comb sections that we had to adjust which they didn't like as much.

Imagine you discovered the mother lode of all thrift stores going out of business and bringing home all kinds of cute side tables, chairs, chests, baskets, etc. only to have a cleaning crew come in and leave with half of it. Without asking.

Not cool.

Despite us rummaging through their stuff, they were still pretty mellow. They grumbled i.e. their buzzing sounded quite a bit louder and urgent than their usual constant hum, but there were no defense flights or straight-out attacks.

We also discovered a few small hive beetles which didn't make us too happy as they can become a real pest, even overrun your hive, but down here in the south it's like termites: the question is not 'if' you will have termites but 'when'.

 Our bees weren't crazy about the little bugs either. We watched them chase them around and even tackle and wrestle with them, so that's good. We'll help them out by installing a beetle trap to manage the numbers.

The coolest thing about Sunday's inspection?

One of the pieces of cross comb we had to cut loose (and shamelessly kept to ourselves) was stuffed with honey. Once we closed up the hive again, the three of us ended up in the backyard again, breaking small pieces of comb running with golden honey over our fingers and getting a first taste of what our bees had produced.

O-MY-GOD! So good! So sweet! So beautiful!
You stick whole chunks of comb into your mouth and chew it like gum and all the honey bursts out (you don't have to eat the wax; you can just spit it out and return it to the bees)
Simply amazing!

Since this is our first year we are not expecting an actual honey harvest; the bees will need pretty much all of it to build up the hive and to last them through the winter so sneaking a bite (or two) is very very precious and a much treasured experience.