TBH Observations.

The TBH now has 19 frames! About 18 of those are at various stages of being drawn out. I added two frames today--one with a small lobe of wax that was built by the previous denizens of the hive and one completely empty. I've been adding frames to both ends of the hive over the last few weeks, and they are happy to work them on both ends, but they store different things at the extremes of the hive.

To the left of the hive, they tend to store honey and brood. To the right it's all pollen and drone brood. They have a lot of pollen--probably 5 solid frames of it, but not much honey. Drone production seems to be slowing down now.

The queen isn't the tidiest egg layer. She tends to spread things out a bit, especially on the drone brood--a few drones here, some honey there. The worker brood is pretty regular, although it seems to be at various stages of development; eggs, next to larva, next to capped brood.

I've noticed more propolis in this hive than in the others. I'm not sure if that has to do with it being a TBH or if they are just heavy propolizers--it doesn't make things impossible, but I do spend time scraping it off so that I can move the bars more easily.

I noticed a couple of supersedure cells today--maybe the workers aren't happy with their queen's performance. Personally, I like her--she's completely black, which makes her easy to spot--I see her pretty much every time I'm in that hive. She seems to have put on some girth over the last few weeks and now seems bigger than when she first arrived. I wonder if she could possibly be a new queen.

Finally, I've noticed a red dragonfly loitering around the hive and occassionally flying through the little cloud of bees at the entrance. It doesn't seem to be eating the bees, but I do wonder why it is attracted to them.