Adding another box and feeder

Yesterday there was a brief warm, partly sunny period between waves of thunderstorms (2 1/2 inch rain total) so I wanted to peek in the new hive and check on the ladies and put a hive top feeder on for them.  When I built my boxes earlier this Spring I sorta made a mistake in that I ended up with a 9-frame size instead of the 8-frame I thought I was making.  Oh well, we'll just call it an experiment!  But, I recieved 9 full frames with the bees so I thought I would start a new box with foundation to give them room to expand.  I also made up some dummy frames (a top bar with a 1x board the size of a drawn frame) to cut down to an 8-frame size.  I will put the dummy in the outside position and that will be the first one I take out whenever I go into the hive.

I decided to pull two of the frames from the bottom and put them in the middle of the new super with 6 frames of foundation and the dummy frame on the outside.  I didn't want to spend a lot of time this first look into the hive so I didn't make a thorough search for the queen, I just gave a quick glance on both sides of each frame and moved on.  I did look for honey, pollen and brood though.  There seemed to be quite a bit of honey but I didn't see much, if any, pollen.  And I was somewhat disappointed by how much brood I saw.  There was capped brood and I saw some fairly large larvae but couldn't be sure I saw eggs.  The larvae and capped brood were undoubtedly before the split 4 days before when we definitely saw the queen.

I put a pollen patty on top of the bottom box, put the new super above that and the hive-top feeder with about 1/2 gallon 1:1 sugar syrup on top of that and closed up the hive.  BTW, I used very little smoke on the entrance and none from then on (of course, the smoker went out!) and the bees were very calm.  I think I could have easily worked them without gloves.  As of dusk last night there was no sign that the bees had discovered the sugar water.  The feeder will not let the bees escape so I can just lift the cover and peek without really disturbing them - although the light that gets into the hive draws some attention, probably because they suspect and invasion.

Given what I think was a low supply of pollen maybe the small amount of brood is understandable.  Hopefully, the pollen patty will  remedy that situation and they will take to rearing a lot more brood very soon (there were quite a lot of bees who could do the job).  We'll see when I peek in again on some warm day (it WILL get warm someday, won't it?).