Busy bees

I am a lazy beekeeper. Despite my best intentions it’s about all I can do to crack open my hives and do a deep check once a month. Some of it is time scarcity, but more of it is just a lack of knowing what I am doing.
As a result of not checking my hives often enough, I often get swarms in the spring. This year I was determined to be a better beekeeper so I had been doing research on how to do a split.
This was especially important to me this spring since I had entered the winter with two hives and emerged with only one. Literally on the day I was going to do the split, I walked outside at lunch to a swarm just starting to exit the hive. Luckily they decided to clump up in one of my backyard apple trees about 5 feet off the ground. Unluckily I was unable to capture them in two separate attempts.
Fearing the worst, I took it as a sign from the great beekeeper in the sky that later that day I got an email from Kelly Bees (no relation) stating that they would have a limited number of 3 lb packages available for shipment in mid May. I whipped out my credit card and placed an order. And 3 as later my give swarmed again and I did successfully capture it.
As a result of now having 3 hives instead of 2, I was short on deep frames for them to make their home in so I did what any terrible bee keeper would do – I filled each of the deeps with half the number of frames hoping that would hold them until the order I placed arrived a few days later.
From the comb they built out in just 3 days, clearly they had other plans. As I said, I am a terrible bee keeper. But they don’t seem to mind. If nothing else this may have given me the last little nudge to go ahead and build that top bar hive I’ve been thinking about. They seem to know what they are doing.