Nadir'ed both hives June 5, 2017

Well, I know it makes for tall hives, but due to the fact that I started my packages in boxes which already had comb/honey, they've been going to town. It's been really warm for early June and I didn't want them to swarm - they were starting to build comb in the bottom boxes, so I got the smoker going and veil'ed up.

Beautiful day, warm, sunny, less humid, light breeze. Took off the feeder boxes then the top 2 boxes on the big hive - Hive A - then the next two boxes, then added the put the empty box below and restacked them. Similarly with Hive B, I removed the feeder box and jars, then the top two boxes but 2 top bars from the bottom (third) box stuck to the bottom of the second box, so those got a little squished, though I tried to keep the boxes tilted to avoid ruining them completely. I salvaged them and put the top bars back in the third box, then I removed it, added the fourth empty box and restacked them all up again.

I didn't look for the queen cages - if I had help, and someone could hold the boxes up for me, I could have tried to do that but they probably built comb around them anyway, so no big deal.

The smoker worked really well and the bees were surprisingly nice considering how intrusive these maneuvers were!

I'll take the feeders off next week.

I then clipped down all the grass by hand.