Queens are active!

It was a sunny day with temps high enough to make it possible to open the hives for an inspection.  The frames are about 70% covered with comb, and roughly 40% of the frames have some brood, about 20% capped!  I should have already put the first mite treatment in the hives, but I didn’t have decent weather. I hope I haven’t made a mistake by not adding two apivar strips per box until today. The label said that for 8 frame boxes, to add one to two strips, so I added two to each box.

I also cleaned out the syrup feeders and refilled them both with fresh syrup.  The same as last time: the Buckfast feeder was empty, the Italian bees still had most of their syrup, although both hives had similar amounts of built frame and brood.

I located the queens in both hives, they are working hard!

Queen marked with green dot