All hail the Queen.  Can you see her?  Center of the photo with the large yellow dot, that is our lady of the hive.  We went into the hive yesterday to take a look, and there she was, at the top of the hive on the outside frame-not a good thing.  What that means is that she is running out of room to lay eggs so lucky for her, we were prepared and had another box of frames ready to go.

The hive is fairly full, so full that they were building comb in the feeder.

Darry cleaned it all out and refilled it with sugar syrup.

The hive has really increased in number, look at how busy they are!

To clean out the feeder, Darry took out the floating bars, the bees were pretty calm about it and just gathered on the slats while he worked and I took photos.

Drones cannot feed themselves when they first emerge from!  The drone (on the left) is being fed by a worker bee (on the right) and he will start feeding himself by the time he is a week old.  To learn more about the roles of bees in the hive, read this article by the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium. Check back for more photos, I will post more next time we go in for a look!