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cool bee pics
. Please have a look at this website, it’s full of beautiful photography. http://www.mytinygarden.com/ If you head to the “Fly” category, then to the “Bee” subcategory, the first picture there, a bee on a dandelion, took my breath away. Amazing photography at very close range. There are 10 other bee photos, that are also very well done, but that first one was the best. Enjoy! .
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night night
. The time had come. Colder weather, shorter days… winter is coming and the honeybees needed more substantial protection than what their hive alone could provide. Enter tar paper (above), saved from last year. You can tell by the grooves and the tiny hole that it had already been used for this purpose. That made putting it on the hives a bit easier than last year, when I was fighting with a large roll of the stuff while trying not to get stung. This time I just followed the grooves and lined up the holes with the upper exits of the hives. Easy peasy. Here’s one papered and the other…
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luxury
. London has an interesting idea – Luxury Hotels for Bees. There are a few different designs. I like the one that looks like a Joseph Cornell box. Thanks Darren for sending me the link. .
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bees in a house in kitchener
.Last night was interesting…. someone had contacted the beekeepers association about a swarm of bees nesting in the siding of a house, so I went with a fellow beekeeper to check it out. The pic above is the hive entrance, but we couldn’t actually figure out where in the wall they were. So, they’re still in the wall of the house. Until we figure out how to get them out..
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backlit
.Today I’ll be taking my observation hive to my daughter’s class! Should be fun. I took a sweet photo last night while checking them out (above). It was late and dark, and the hive was backlit by my back door light. Why late and dark? Because everybody’s home then. I need to lock them all in for safely transporting and showing the kiddies in the class. If I had waited until this afternoon, a lot of the bees would be out foraging (provided it’s not pouring down rain like it is right now) and they would be very confused upon returning home to where their house once was. Grade 2…
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rub a grub
.Here’s the main reason my bees have been so angry with me and humankind lately: all of the extra comb and brood in the picture above needed to be scraped off, so I could actually inspect the hive. The white grub-looking things are larvae: stage 2 in the life cycle of a bee. Before that, they were eggs laid by the queen. After that, they were going to be pupae, locked in their cells by a wax covering over the entrance. The pupa stage is kind of like the cocoon of a moth or chrysalis of a butterfly; when pupae eat their way out of the cell, they are adults.…
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bad behaviour
.I’m sorry to report that my bees have not been behaving themselves lately. The girls decided that Janine Grespan and her cameraman Kevin were a little too close to the hive – at more than 50 feet away! Angie was about to be interviewed for a special feature on organic farms when the bees came charging on the scene, sabotaging the shoot. They had to relocate so they could finish the interview. I thought they were still mad at me for disrupting their hive yesterday, taking some brood and honey for my observation hive. After talking with Ken, though, it seems there might have been a skunk around. I’ll have…
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oh boys
. My only real issue with this video is the stingers on the boy bees. You can’t have a stinger package and a *cough* male package. There’s not enough room. The girls get the stingers, the boys get the ability to genetically alter the next generation. Fair is fair I guess. In both scenarios, the bee dies after using it once. Quite the sacrifice. Thanks Ken for sending me the link..
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cleaning house
.Here’s another reason why I thought the blue hive was dead: no dead bees on the outside. Bees are such tidy insects – they’ll haul out their dead so the hive is kept clean. No dead bees on the outside made me think they were all dead on the inside! Not the case, though, as I mentioned in a previous post. They’re all happily working away at building their colonies, and in a month or two they should be up to about 50,000 bees or more in each hive..
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bees in a house
.200 pounds of honey in a house. My guess is, there were probably about 100,000 bees there too. If you have 2 minutes: Video Link Yikes.Thanks to my friend Carolyn who sent me the link..