The Trouble with Honey Bees

The trouble with honey bees is that they do sting. Beth and I had an eventful first inspection of our two new bee hive colonies. The good news we discovered is that they were thriving, and appeared that both queens were laying eggs so the colonies could grow and gather enough food to survive their first winter. Being new to bee keeping, it seemed we allowed a larger gap for the queen cage than needed. The bees tried to fill this gap with new comb, known as burr comb,...which I knew we had to remove so the bees could build comb onto the super frames. I never, ever dreamed I would be sticking my bare hand down into a hive of 10,000 bees. We decided to not use the smoker originally because we didn't want to disturb the bees. Well, we ended up needing to disturb them to remove all of the burr comb.