Checking Hives

so yesterday was a busy day for me, I was checking out the national hive that I bought a week ago, plus a quick check on the two langstroth hives.

as you can see, we had some brood in the top super, below was a super with comb honey inserts in the frames

then we had a queen excluder and another super, which was to make the hive into what we call brood and half,

and lastly the bottom brood box, it's obvious the new queen was skinny enough to go through the excluder into the top supers, and she was there at least 4 to 5 days ago as I spotted young larvae, plus no signs of new queen cups, which the bees would have started had they been queenless, the cells in the bottom box are old ones

so we did not see a marked yellow queen, the dot may have been cleaned off by the workers, only time will tell, it's too late in the season to worry about new queens, so let's just keep fingers crossed and see what happens.

I also checked out the two langstroth hives, and came to the discission that langstroth hives are really not my cup of tea, I have two mann lake hybrid national hives here going spare, so I'll use a couple of langstroth crown boards fixed to the national brood boxes and add them above the lang brood boxes next year, and swap over to those, this of course means I either have to adjust/shorten my flow frames to fit, or sell them and go back to spinning honey out of frames, as I have adjusted my extractor as per earliier video,it is not such a hard thing to do.

UPDATE 7th OCTOBER;

I quickly checked this hive today, no video as I forgot to clean the lense casing so everything looks foggy, anyhow, apart from picking up a sting to the thumb, there is a queen in there somewhere, as I clearly saw young larvae, as I picked this up 30 days ago, any eggs that were there at the time would be brood or hatched, eggs last 3 days, and larvae for 6, before being capped, so that proves theres a queen in there, and it's still packed solid with bees, so much so that the wet super I put back on above a crown board for them to clear out, is instead being filled again, I'll leave this hive alone now till next year, apart from adding any fondant, but I doubt they will need that, as they have loads of capped honey within those two supers.