4th Bee Box

When we bought everything for the hive we only bought three medium supers.  Normally with regular sized supers you only need two for brood boxes but being that ours our smaller it turns out that we should use three.  By the first week of June the bees had definitely filled out the two they had so we put on the third and ordered a fourth. 

Last week I painted the box and taught Andy how to install the wax foundation.  On Sunday we checked the hive and sure enough they had mostly filled out the third box so it was time to put on a fourth.  The fourth box is only for honey so we put the queen excluder between the third and fourth boxes so that she can't get up there to lay eggs.

The frames from the third box with nicely built out white, clean comb.

Look at that pretty pattern.  The honey and pollen is being stored on the outside while the inside oval is being left open for brood.

I was a little worried that maybe we were jumping the gun because while the comb was built out, nectar and pollen was stored, and honey was being processed I still didn't see any eggs or brood.  And then I spied some on a couple of frames and breathed a sigh of relief that everything in the hive is still going well.

Our hive is getting tall with 4 supers.