Bees loving the moss on rocks around pond

Bees on moss

As I was getting ready to drain my pond to clean it and separate the water lilies, I realized that bees were flocking to the moss on a few of the rocks.  I've never noticed that before, but I've seen the bees drinking the water when they can find a leaf or other safe spot to drink without drowning. Perhaps they are drinking from the moisture in the moss.

bees on moss that grows on rocks around pond

 Yesterday, May 6th, I went into the two hives to see how they were doing.

A look at Hive #1

Hive #1 on left

Hive #1 is the one that survived last winter and I hadn't gone into the bottom deep yet this year so that was one task.  Wow.  I had two broken frames in there and the bees had built comb everywhere, including the sides of the hive.  One of the broken frames, was loaded with brood and I didn't know what to do with it so I put it aside and did some research.  I found that someone mentioned placing it as intact as possible onto a new frame that had no comb on it and use elastics to hold it in place.  The bees would patch it up.  So that's what I did to one of them.  The other broken frame didn't have that much brood on it so I just replaced it with an empty frame.

I'm glad I did it now because I don't get into the bottom deep very often.  Once I have two deeps on, later in the summer, the top deep is too heavy for me to be lifting off so doing it in the spring, when there are fewer bees and less honey in the hive, makes it easier.  The top deep gets looked at and cleaned where needed more often.

Checking Hive#2

Hive #2 looks good.  There were many frames with brood and larvae and pollen and some capped honey...looks like a good, healthy queen is laying lots of eggs. And the comb pattern is normal.

However, I found these two frames with this odd comb pattern shown below. I've never seen this before and wasn't sure what to do.  I ended up putting them back into the hive, hoping they all get filled in eventually.  But then this morning I sent the photo below to the local beekeeping group to see if anyone knows anything about this sort of pattern to see what it means, if anything. I wondered if I should replace these but I don't have any frames that are already built with comb.  If I did, I would have just replaced these with others.  But all I have are bare frames in my "extra" pile. We'll see if anyone else has an answer.