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expert help
A big thanks to Ken and Steve for coming out to my beeyard yesterday! Here you see Ken scraping the junk off a bottom board – something I hadn’t thought to do since getting my bees. Here’s what came off them: You can see different kinds of pollen – the different colour pollen comes from different flowers – and other random junk that fell to the bottom of the hive. This kind of thing attracts Wax Moth and other nuisances, so it’s a good idea to scrape it off every once in awhile. When you remember. Or when someone else remembers for you..
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reno
I’m pretty sure one or both of my hives will need a second brood box soon, which means I need to get them ready! This is the first coat of paint for these boxes. The reddish colour is my old hallway colour, and the blue is even older – it’s from our newlywed apartment. 9 years today (happy anniversary dear!), so it’s been around for awhile. Anyway, back to bees: this time I’m going to paint two coats of paint without primer underneath. My first boxes were done with primer and paint, but I’ve recently read that it works better if you don’t use primer. Who knows? I say why…
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bees with balls
It looks like my queens have decided to grow some drones. See the capped cells that bulge out? Those will be male bees. The queen makes the decision to lay a male or female, usually based on the diameter of the cell. Once she’s made her decision, she makes it happen by either fertilizing the egg for a female bee, or leaving the egg unfertilized for a male bee. She can do this because she has a special sac inside her for storing the sperm. For each egg laid, she first measures the cell with her antennae, then turns around and backs up into the cell to lay the egg…
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look out world
Here she comes! Can you see the worker bee chewing her way out of the cell that she pupated in? Right near the middle of the picture. This is her first job as a fully developed bee. She is 21 days old, and full grown. She started as an egg, fertilized and laid by the queen in the cell. She developed for about 3 days in the egg before she hatched and other workers started feeding her. She is now a larva – looks like a little white grub – and very hungry. She eats until she’s fully grown, about 6 days, then the workers seal the cell with wax.…
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elusive
Every time I open my hives, I am on the lookout for my queens. It’s a good idea to know where they are, so they are not accidentally misplaced or incapacitated. However, for some reason the queen in my second hive seems to see me coming and vanish. I haven’t seen her since I installed the bees – that’s about a month. I know she’s there, I see the proof: there are always wee eggs in the comb, so I know she’s been there within 2 or 3 days. This hive is also my stronger hive, with more bees and more frames filled with brood and honey. They’re also the…
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marked
Can you find the queen? She’s a bit hidden, but you can tell which one she is. Here’s a better picture:She’s marked for easy identification purposes. It’s always a good thing to make sure you know that your queen is in the hive and well, not lost or squished. I’m not sure what this one was doing way over here on a pile of capped honey – maybe trying to hide from me, who knows. Usually she can be found on empty comb laying eggs, with workers bringing her food to eat, grooming her, and carrying away her poo. .
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what the heck
To my Dear Bees: Why would you build comb and fill it with honey in the squishy little space between the top of the frames and the inner cover, when you have more than two empty frames yet to fill in your hive?
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friends
Some of the ladies came to visit me as I was watching the swarm settle into their new home. They hung around for a bit, let me take some pictures, then flew off to see what was going on with everybody else. Very docile. We thought the bees might be on edge, given the cloudy conditions and pending thundershowers, but they were fine. It was a busy buzz, not an angry buzz. Yes, there’s a difference. If I have a pressure headache, I will not go anywhere near my hives. Bees feel it too, and get a bit cranky. Just like me..
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a new home
Continuing the saga of the swarm: it didn’t take long – about a few minutes – for the bees to head down into the hive box between the frames. They’re exploring the possibility of this new place, probably walking all around the box to measure it and figure out if it will work for them to live in. Meanwhile, back at the branch, some bees are still trying to cluster, not quite sure what just happened: They’ll eventually figure it out by following the pheromone that the queen releases – they’ll find her by smell and join their sisters in setting up house..
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beautiful bees
I’m so glad I was able to go see the swarm yesterday. There’s something wildly different about seeing bees up close without the familiar constraints of the hive box. Wow are they gorgeous. A solid mass of bees, hanging from a branch. They didn’t mind me poking around with my camera, inches away from their cluster. They were too focussed on taking care of the queen and trying to find a new home..