Sunday 21 July 2013

First Hive Inspection Report

At last! I have been treated to a glimpse into inner the world of my bees!


 Serious achievement: lighting my smoker all by myself!! 
Starting with a little soft cardboard from an egg box...
Add some bone dry rotted wood 

Pack it in nice and tighly and flip on the lid.
puff the bellows a few times to keep it all alight, and it was ready to go.




 A little smoke in the hive entrance tells the bees "There may be a fire nearby - gorge yourself on nectar in case we have to evacuate."
Once full of honey, the bees are conditioned not to sting:  stinging means death to a bee. Death for a full bee means a stomach full of honey lost for the colony. If you look at the pics below, you'll see a number of bees with their heads shoved in a cell - they are sucking up as much nectar as they can at that moment. 


The lid is off - I had a few lumps of rogue comb to remove from the tops of the frames, then...


lift out a frame to see what is going on. Just a few bees on there huh?
As I suspected, my resident ladies have been extremely busy.
In just two weeks they had pulled out the wax to make comb on about 80% of the brood frames, and the queen had clearly been hard at work laying - I had the full compliment of brood:  eggs, larvae in different stages of growth - all pearly white and curled up in their snug little cells - and capped larvae, pupating into bees behind a wax door.
All good healthy signs to see.

You need good eye sight for this, but if you look in the cells to the right of the bottom two bees, there are tiny little white commas. They look a bit like shine marks, but they are eggs. The amber liquid is stored nectar. The bees wait until most of the water evaporates from it before capping it. Only then is it honey.


At least 5 frames had brood laid in them, all showing a lovely classic pattern - an oval of eggs/larvae/capped larvae in the middle, pollen in an arc above that, and nectar or capped honey in the top corners.
Another good sign is that all the capped larval cells were for worker bees. No drones larvae means no one is planning on a mating flight, which means the colony is not planning to swarm again....phew.
The palest coloured open cells contain juicy fat larvae. The wax capped cells have pupating bees in them. All workers - nice flat wax caps.

Several frames at either end of the brood box were being drawn out and filled all over with nectar for food stores.
There were two frames at one end that had not been touched.  Bees tend to lay symmetrically starting in the middle of a brood box and working out evenly on each side.  I'll keep an eye on that. I might have to move my empty frames to be included in the symmetrical pattern so that they don't become wasted space.

Joy of joys! I saw the her majesty herself, calmly wondering around on a frame, attended by some workers, with plenty of tiny freshly laid eggs in evidence.
The queen is hard to spot for a beginner, so I was thrilled to see her. She is about 1/4 inch longer in the abdomen than the workers.
So, the bees are healthy and busy.
My biggest concern is to make sure there is plenty of space. Since they came as a swarm, they would not think twice to swarm again if I let them get cramped.
A quick reference back to my bee books and notes from my classes confirmed my hunch - time to get my first super in place. Perhaps having more space to store only honey will free up some of the brood frames for the queen to lay in.

Saturday 6 July 2013

The Bees Knees!

The latest news from the hive:  my bees have been coming home with loaded knees!
They are bringing in pollen - which is new - meaning that they are storing up food for larvae.
And THAT means my queen bee is laying eggs.....all is going as it should.
Hooray!
See the yellow bulges on the side of the bee entering the hive?  That's pollen. Mark was brave enough to take this picture - not an easy thing to do, as they buzz in and out remarkably fast!  He's getting the bee bug too...

Pollen can come in a huge number of different colours and shades. If the bees store enough of it, you can end up with honey comb that looks like a mosaic of hexagonal colours! (Blue, black, red, brown, yellow, green, orange....)

I am itching (not with hives) to open up the brood box and see what they are up to, but I have to wait at least until next Wednesday when they will have had two weeks to get established.   I'll just have to be satisfied with taking a quick peak in through a hole in the crown board when I change the feed bucket.  There was a mass of bees crawling all over the place last time I peaked....and the bees had eaten at least 3lbs of sugar after one week.

The other positive news is that the weather has improved vastly, so the bees are getting out and about a good deal to forage.

Will report further on Wednesday......

Wednesday 3 July 2013

Contemplating the stars

Warning, Mummy brag heading your way:
I set Joel a task this morning.
I had been looking at diagrams of star lifecycles to show the kids, but they all seemed to be a little different from each other depending on which website or book I looked at. I suspect some were out of date, others simplified, or being used to demonstrate one particular aspect of the process.
Either way, as usual, I was not satisfied with anyone else's answer, so I decided to make my own.
Except Joel knows far more than me about such things, so I delegated the job.

I was MOST impressed with the resulting diagram he came up with, using a simple graphics package.
Here it is.
Click on image to get a bigger readable version.

Monday 1 July 2013

Swarm again!

How exciting - I got to do it all over again!
I had a phone call from a friend at a local park to say "There are bees on the swing frame, are you interested?"  It just so happened that I had a friend who was, but since he couldn't get there in a hurry, I headed off to stand guard and be on hand to led a hand at redirecting bees.

This lot could not be snipped and pruned into their box - the park might not have approved of us chopping up the swing frame....but just look how they had wrapped around it!
the other side was covered too - lovely stripey orange bees again.
This time was not quite so text-bookish!  We tried to sweep them into a box using goose wings, and caught the main dangly bit at the bottom, but at least half the swarm flew off.

We placed the box on the ground with a pale sheet next to it.  A few bees were clustered on the outside of the box,doing their "Nasonov" fanning (the bottoms up thing I mentioned in the last post), which led us to believe that the queen was inside.

As time passed, some bees landed on the sheet, others re-clustered on the swing frame.  Then, the bees on the sheet made a nice straight line, and firmly marched their way onto the box.
So, we opened the lid a crack, and in they all went!  I was totally fascinated to watch them....and standing around waiting for them to do it themselves was much more fun than trying to herd bees.  They are worse than cats!

Periodically we swept the cluster on the frame off, and gradually they would land on the sheet and do the same thing.  Clever little critters that they are, nearly all of them ended up in the box!
We wrapped the sheet around, and as far as I know they are now safely in my friend's hive.