Today I learned the importance of wearing beekeeping equipment the proper way. We were inspecting the hives (both langstroth and batay style) and I kept finding bees in my suit. My friends helped me smash them before they stung me. Our hives are in good shape and we even were able to spot the queen in one hive. The egg laying patterns were good indicating a healthy queen (it’s a circular pattern) and plenty of new queen’s had just chewed their way out of a split hive ( a portion of a strong hive was moved to a second box). I even got to cut old wax from a Langstroth hive.
While walking back from the apiary we stopped to pick some giant blackberries (see picture)
We were supposed to do a wild swarm capture, but unfortunately someone discovered the tree with the bees and stole all the honey thus destroying the hive. You can imagine our sadness because not only were we not able to expand our number of hives, but all those bees would die.