A bad day at the association apiary

[gavin]

Many thanks to Bill and Sean for another session preparing stuff for our association apiary. Eight days ago I bought two colonies for the apiary from a beekeeper who was giving up for health reasons. I might have named him elsewhere so the next thing I'm going to do is edit that out (*). His bees were inspected two summers ago and found to be free of serious disease at the time. We were not far from there on Thursday night to see EFB in the flesh as it were. So after finishing the work, Bill headed off home and Sean and myself lingered and went to inspect the two colonies, both on double brooded Smith hives. The first was a lovely, mild colony without any problems that we could see. The second was tetchy, suffering from too much Varroa, quite a bit of chalkbrood .... and .... well, what can you see? Here are two frames, each in distant view and two progressively closer views. See what you can see in the distant view, which is similar to what you see when holding a frame up.

(* can't find it - didn't want to expose the fellow as he is a kindly gent who genuinely wants to help)

Frame 1:


closer ...



closest ....





And here is frame 2:



closer ....



and closest ......