John took a peek into the supers yesterday as he had seen massive activity outside the 1st Italians the day before, triggering some concern about the hive kicking off a swarm due to overcrowding. If there was an overcrowding issue, then we figured we needed to add more supers to give them some room. I must admit some "bummerness" that neither Italians had done much in the supers, but were both working the frames in them. While I am getting great pleasure out of wrangling 130,000 or so of head of bees, I am in it for the honey and would love to have a bumper crop this year.
One thing to note, it appears that the perpendicular excluder issue was a good idea - or at least not a bad idea. We placed the excluders on Monday and they were already starting to work the frames by Thursday. The worker bees seem to be undeterred by the screens, so we just have to wait and see if we find eggs to see if the queen avoids the area or not.
A bit silly to think so and over-optimistic, but I can dream, right?
Bob
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