The bees are booming...

I had gone more than three weeks without any hive inspection and a couple weeks longer than that without a full inspection going beyond the top box.  I had a chance to do a longer inspection today but still didn't make it into the bottom box on either hive, in part due to the heat, and in part because my smoker wasn't staying lit.

The North hive has quite a few bees on it and more than the other hive.  I had stopped by to look at the hives earlier in the week and there were many more bees than this on the outside of the hive.  I have read that this has to do with the heat and humidity, and is normal behavior.

I had added a fourth box to both hives just before leaving on vacation for two weeks as the hives seemed to be fully drawn out on three boxes, the South hive slightly more than the North.  This is the first frame pulled out of the top box on the South hive and it is fully drawn out and full of uncapped honey.

This is the center frame out of the top box.  It shows was the only frame that had some capped and uncapped brood in it.  The yellow part is brood and the white is capped honey.  There is some comb on the bottom of the frame as well.  I could use an excluder to prevent the queen from getting to this top box so there would be no brood in with the honey, but some people say that the excluder discourages worker bees from going up into the box to store honey, so I thought I would try going without it.

This is another frame out of the middle of the top box, full of honey with some of it capped.  This frame also shows some additional comb on the bottom.  This may be related to crowding as the bees had completely filled the frames.  I scraped all of this off.  The bees had been sticking things together much more than before and I had to pry boxes and frames out more than in the past.

This the second frame out of the third box ( top box of the brood chamber part of the hive).  It shows some brood (the yellow) but mostly a lot of capped honey stores for the bees.

The bees had put comb between the boxes and there was larva in this comb that was pulled apart as I pulled the boxes off.  This was between the second and third boxes on the South hive.  I believe that the brood in this comb was drone larvae but I'm not sure.

This is a frame from the second (North) hive -- I think from the top of hte brood chamber, showing brood and capped honey.  There seemed to be more drone cells in this hive than in the other, but not to an alarming extent.

This is also in the second hive, and you can see the raised domes of drone brood in the brood area.  This hive was not quite as filled out as the first one though it also had quite a bit of honey in the top box.  I added a fifth box onto the South hive but decided to wait a  week or so before doing so on the North hive as it was not fully drawn out yet.