Pollen Coming On; School Performances

My Carniolan bees have been flying like crazy with the warmer temperatures we are finally getting here. I just might venture to say we are done with inversions for the season! I've been reading on the Honey Bee Suite blog about three-deep hives and the reasoning behind stacking three brood chambers on each other rather than a more traditional two-deep hive. The best reasons seem to be swarm prevention first of all -- if the girls feel like they have enough space in their current location they will hopefully be less inclined to seek space elsewhere. The second reason is they overwinter much better in space like this thanks to more space to store honey and pollen. Another is to increase honey production. In any case, I've decided to try it this year to see if it works for me. And I'm only doing one hive this year. I tried to order another package of bees just too late and they were sold out.

The bees are already finding pollen. Can you spot the two bees with loaded pollen baskets on their hind legs? The pollen on these two is white. I've also seen orange pollen. I'm not sure where they're finding it because I haven't seen obvious signs of pollen, but the girls are finding it and so has my nose -- I've been sneezing like crazy!

This is now the middle brood chamber on my hive. Bees abhor extra space, so they filled the empty frame space with a honeycomb frame of their own making. 

Here's my new three-deep hive configuration. There's a queen excluder on already, separating the topmost deep and the more shallow honey super right above it. The topmost box you can see is actually empty of frames. I put five mostly empty honey jars in there to let the bees clean out. They'd held honey I had harvested last year and I didn't want to just wash out what we hadn't scraped out. 

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It's school performance time. Bronwyn entered her school talent show with a vocal solo and a trio with a couple of her friends.  She sang "You Raise Me Up" and her trio sang "Sing" by Gary Barlow. You should hear the original version of that one. It was written by Gary  and Andrew Lloyd Webber for Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee last year. The girls did a great job and I was so proud of them. Bronwyn decided to do this all on her own and she organized the rehearsals and costumes all on her own.

Evan is in his school's production of "The Wiz." Here he is in his flying monkey costume. They have little ears pinned to their hoods and little gray wings pinned on their backs.

Ollie, the Flying Monkeys Captain and Evan

Ollie, Michael, Evan, with Jaden in front