Schampell TBH Inspection/harvest

Checked out the inside of the Schampell TBH today.
Last night I noticed that there was a small cluster on the outside of the hive. I wondered if they were out of room. I've been seeing drones also so I wanted to get a look.

The first bar on the south end was a partially drawn out comb with nectar in it (none capped).
The next 10 bars were packed. Mostly capped brood with some eggs and larvae scattered about.
The next bar was solid pollen both sides. This ended up breaking off because the comb guide had detached from the top bar. I tried unsuccessfully to reattach it with aluminum strips and I ended up just removing  (for now)
the next 10 bars were honey - mostly capped. The last 4 were cross combed pretty bad and the last 6 were attached to a mess of comb that had fallen last year and I had left in there.

 I removed the cross combed honey bars as well as another. I removed all the comb from the bottom and sides. This leaves them with 5 bars of honey (mix capped and uncapped). I left several empty bars on the north end, spacing them between full bars to encourage straight comb building. I did the same thing on the south end with the last 2 bars in the nest area.

I did notice many, many drones throughout the hive. I did not see the queen (though I did see eggs). I also did not see any queen cells. I did see a couple of very small cups on the edge of a couple of combs.

I took 2 stings. The first from a bee that crawled up my pant leg. She didn't sting me, however, until I removed my pants to try to free her. Upon loosening my waist, she was able to proceed up and into my shirt and ended up stinging me in my left armpit. Ouch! The other sting was through the shirt on my right bicep. The second one swelled much more than the first.

I did not smoke them (perhaps I should have knowing how invasive I was planning to be. I did spray them with water after they got worked up to try to calm them down. An hour after I closed up the hive, there were still a few that would dive bomb me by the back door.

Also, now 3 hours after the inspection there are quite a lot of bees hanging on the outside of the hive (above the entrance holes). Not sure what they are doing. Many of the bars had bur comb attaching the comb to the side of the hive. This was cut with a serrated knife before removing the comb. With so many bees in the hive, I'm afraid I squished several with the knife each time I cut the bur comb. I hope I didn't injure the queen.

This hive will be moving to the Patterson farm on Wednesday.