It’s finally warm enough here, so I could clean all the corpses out of the two hives that survived the winter (one got eaten by a mouse).
There was around 2cm layer of dead bees in there, so the surviving ones had to find an alternate way to go out for a walk. I’m happy to see that there was plenty of food for the winter, though, and they’re already raising the next generation of brood.
For extra dull points, the bees were so dull that I didn’t have to wear a mask or gloves.
The bees in the photo are dead, in case you wonder. I tossed them out and returned the comb to their live relatives.
Now that I think about it, I don’t actually know: Do you poke them out of the honeycomb, or do you just remove big chunks of honeycomb and just put back the wooden frame?
Combs are unpokable (there are cells on either side, with a partition in the middle). I could probably get the dead bees out with tweezers, but didn’t have time to do that. I’ll let bee undertaners take these out. I only scraped off these that were easy to remove, or in a pile under the frames.