The bees are okay

The bees are okay. In case you were wondering how they survived the recent bee fiasco, it looks like they are doing fine.

My friend Libby came over this morning. Libby has kept bees for fifteen years or so, so she knows a lot more than me. We looked at the hive, and it looked good. Not great, but good. The bees have mites, which are like body lice for adult bees, but are deadly to bee babies. Mites are fairly normal, and the infestation doesn't seem bad enough to be worth treating yet. I'll keep an eye on them.

Also, they do not have as much food for winter as I would like, but they've done really well considering. The middle super is very heavy and full of capped honey, which is great. They really haven't put anything in the top super yet, but it's only been on about a week and a half.

We didn't take the hive all the way apart to look at the brood (bee babies), in part because the middle super was so heavy with honey, but what we could see looked fine.

Just for orientation purposes, here is a top down view of a super. The horizontal wooden bars are the top of the frames, the sheets of wax comb hang down from those wooden bars.

Here is a side view of the hive.