Alright, so it has been awhile since the last time I posted anything; so I am going to just give the significant stuff from the bee journal we have been keeping. 5-16-11 we took off entrance reducers at the beginning of the month. We added the second hive bodies as planned to each of the hives, but we still fed them sugar water, though not as much. 5-28-11 today Ron and I went out to peek in on both of the hives. Both hives were very active, more active than ever before. Went into the Carniolan's hive and took away the feeder. Smoked the hive quite a bit and took a look at the top hive body. the girls have already started to lay wax and the queen is laying in the middle of the upper body. The hive had a lot of burr com that we had to get rid of, and we tried to space the frames a bit better. We then took a look at the Italian's hive, it was nearly identical. 6-?-11 we put on queen excluder and honey shallow since the girls had filled about 8 of the frames in the upper hive body. 7-9-11Carniolans have yet to do anything up in the top, and we are unsure why... they seem to be doing good work in the bottom still. the Carniolans don't seem nearly as active as the Italians, just slower in general. the Italians have been poking around in the honey shallow a bit but they have not done any real work up there yet. 7-22-11 Carniolans still have not done anything in the super. Italians are doing some great work, they have laid wax and are putting nectar up there! 8-21-11 Today was a big day Carniolans still not really doing much with the super, laying some wax but that is it. Italians on the other hand have laid wax on all frames... not completely on the outer frames yet, but they are working the whole box. They have 4-5 full frames of honey, so against better judgement we took 1 frame for ourselves. We scraped the wax and honey from the frame into a cheesecloth lined colander, then we took the cheesecloth and twisted it and wrung it until we could get no more honey out and there was just the wax left. We got 1 medium dip jar plus 7 baby food jars full. It isn't much but just think, that is from 1 frame... we have 19 more. next year hopefully we can pull all that upper honey since they will be more established. 9-17-11 checked in on the hives,they seem to be doing fine still very active in the Italian's. we looked down into the hive honey shallow has 4 frames full of honey right in the center, upper hive body has brood in center and little honey around the outer, bottom body has hardly anything in it, a little pollen and honey around the outer edges but nothing in the center. Carniolan's hive has nothing in the shallow but wax, upper hive body has honey throughout nearly the whole thing with a bit of brood in the lower portions of the middle frames, bottom has lots of brood in the center area with honey/some pollen around the outer edges. so it turns out that they might be doing just as well if not better than the Italians, though you would not no it by looking at them. I also put the entrance reducers on this week to prepare for this winter.