Sunday, May 30, 2010
Temp: back to normal!!
The temperatures went back to seasonal norm for my area (25c to about 12c at night) instead of the bread oven hot of 34c to 25c it was for a few days last week!! The clover is starting, I noticed some sweet yellow clover on the road yesterday along with the Alsike Clover and Bird Vetch are all pushing out flowers, of the three the sweet clover is by far the best for bees, at high season if you spot a clump, take a close look you should see many bees happily working its multi-floral spikes.
Bees also need to drink. If your climate is hot and dry you will need some clean water near your hives, even if it isn't a nearby clean water source is a very good idea, you can create a slow drip watering station by punching a pinhole in the bottom of a bucket and standing it above a board, this lets the bees drink the water on the board without drowning and keeps the water from going septic. They use water to cool their hives through evaporation and to feed brood. So armed with this venerable knowledge I set out in search of a common watering hole for my four hives, I checked along our roadside ditch and found them getting water from our well run-off, this is nice since the run-off water is actually human potable.
The temperatures went back to seasonal norm for my area (25c to about 12c at night) instead of the bread oven hot of 34c to 25c it was for a few days last week!! The clover is starting, I noticed some sweet yellow clover on the road yesterday along with the Alsike Clover and Bird Vetch are all pushing out flowers, of the three the sweet clover is by far the best for bees, at high season if you spot a clump, take a close look you should see many bees happily working its multi-floral spikes.
Bees also need to drink. If your climate is hot and dry you will need some clean water near your hives, even if it isn't a nearby clean water source is a very good idea, you can create a slow drip watering station by punching a pinhole in the bottom of a bucket and standing it above a board, this lets the bees drink the water on the board without drowning and keeps the water from going septic. They use water to cool their hives through evaporation and to feed brood. So armed with this venerable knowledge I set out in search of a common watering hole for my four hives, I checked along our roadside ditch and found them getting water from our well run-off, this is nice since the run-off water is actually human potable.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Since it is sunny and HOT today like every sunny day I pulled out my wax melter.
You can see the thermometer inside, this design doesn't work that well, it is to deep, a better design would be a black metal sheet 4 - 6 inches away from the glass, this will be change when I get around to it. It will still reach almost 100c the problem is when you pile comb inside the top layer melts then runs down to a cooler layer and freezes, so a larger flat black metal surface about 6" away from the glass should work much better.
This is a shot of some de-waxed comb, you can see the cacoons made inside each wax cell by the bee larva, once the wax is gone they just fall apart.
Friday, May 21, 2010
High 24c, low 10c
I checked out my hives today to see if they had enough stores to remove the feeders, it's been warm and suny for almost a week now so they should be putting some away for a rainy day. I feed them only if they really need it. eg. I do something like cut them out of their former hive, or I split them, or I take to much honey and they are light in the spring. So pretty much if I do something to them that removes their emergency stores, they can't forage if its raining or cold. This being said I fed my four cut-outs until they had some brood stores, I don't like feeding all season since this runs the risk of making the broodnest honeybound. Hive #7 was ready to remove my cut-out frames.
I love hive #7 it is super clean, you can see the bees trying to shove the elastic bands out the vent holes, almost all the elastic is centred around the holes, some was actually worked out through the screen!
In this shot you can see all the pollen brought in by early foragers, this was at the entrance end so it seemed like all the foragers and foraging age bees were here learning and teaching nectar locations, they were also more twitchy at this end, so I was getting a bit twitchy myself, I just had a veil on with short sleeves, no smoker! Top bar hives are nice that way you only expose two bars (one side of each) instead of exposing the whole hive at once, since the bars form the inner cover.
Here you can see one of my bees dancing to show a nectar location.
This is a video that describes what's going on. (not mine)
Sunday, May 16, 2010
The weather is superb, this of course means check-up time for my new colonies. They all have eggs, that's a good sign. I was able to remove most of my temp cut-out frames from hives #3 and #6, #1 (Lazarus) and #7 I couldn't. #1 because it is still small and #7 because they haven't completed attaching the comb yet. I was pleased that Lazarus was so clean, they removed ALL of the dead bees since May 10th, I would expect this from a larger hive but these gals are really special.
In this picture (bottom left) you can see some baby bees, they are more grey and fuzzier then adults. So cute you just want to hug them and pet them and squeeze them and love them and name them george!
I filled all the feeders again except for #3 they had some stores so they should be fine, I like to feed new cut-outs because they have a lot of brood and no reserves, this can be a problem if it happens to rain a lot the next day or week.
My wax melter wasn't a huge success, I'll bee modifying it though, never give up!
Saturday, May 15, 2010
The weather seems to be getting back on track, this week is almost all sun with high temps in the 20+ range! Very nice, for both the best kind of Anthophila and the bipedal primates who love them!
I was able to get some nice pictures of bees foraging the apples and crab apples, they act very differently then when they forage on dandelions, almost hyper and twitchy, you can hear the whole tree buzzing with bees.
Lazarus seems to be doing well, I was watching it today waiting for some bee to exit carrying a dead bee, it's always fun to see them clean house, they don't just drop their garbage out the front door, often they will carry it off more then 100 meters just droping it at random spots. This can be a good sign they have enough bees in the hive to devote some time to house cleaning. I haven't checked any of my hives yet on account of the weather being crumby. Since tomorrow is supposed to be nice this is on my to-do list. I don't want them to get crowded, I also want to see what their feed looks like, if they have some capped honey I can stop feeding the larger hives.
Also on that list is a test run of my solar wax melter! Photos of the thing in action will be forthcoming I hope. I am almost at the end of my building spree for the year! Weee!
On another note today I came up with a really neat idea for making my own nucs, several challenges to overcome are, practical construction, support structure, flexibility and wintering considerations. I believe I have an answer to these demands, if I use one of my standard hives and drill entrance holes in four places along the top of both sides, two on one side and two on the other, in alternating placement. Then cut out three extra follower boards, using those I can divide the hive into four section with about nine top bars each, sections have their own entrance two on each side of the hive. This would allow me to winter four nucs in one hive body, keep down construction costs, also all I have to do to convert it back is plug the extra holes.
Enjoy some pictures of the pretty part of the apple tree
Friday, May 14, 2010
This story begins with a simple statement, I have bees...
Hmm says I, is that right? Yes there are hundreds of them, they have been there for at least three years. So I said I would take a look since the place (Alexandria) isn't that far (about 20 min) from where I'm located (Dalkeith). Upon arriving I found out the bees seemed to be in the attic, so I check the attic, crawled all over trying to find a place they would nest to no avail.
Then I got a peek into their hive through the entrance they were using, this revealed that they were in fact inside the houses wall, between the studs. So I'm thinking to myself "great people hate it when you cut up the inside of their houses". Turns out it wasn't a problem for the guy, he needed to do some exterior work and the bees were making it imposable, they don't take kindly to people messing around "their" homes. So off I go to prepare for the next day, once home I loaded up the car with my equipment for the job threw a ladder on the car and went to bed dreaming of bees....Early the next morning (May 13th) I got up and went to work. When I arrived at 8:30 am the bees looked like they were still sleeping, no big deal this time of year they don't get started till 9:00 or 9:30.
The bees didn't seem to mind the intrusion, this is strange since most commercial beeks think feral colonies are mean, this is my 4th feral hive and I have been stung maby 3 or 4 times in all, granted it is still early in the year and they haven't finished building up yet, and I do ware nitril gloves, to prevent them thinking me a threat. I don't even smoke them since this makes the queen panic making her harder to find.The process I use for cut-outs is simple:
1##2
I vacuum up the leftover bees, since I found the queen before this stage I didn't have to watch for her while vacuuming. Can you spot the queen?
I make sure to set the bee vacuum to as low a setting that will still suck up bees as possible, less trauma, thats why one doesn't want to suck up the queen, shes one special bee!
Then all that's left is to close everything up (nuc and bee-vac) pack up and go home. Job done!
bee-vac and nuc with bees behind the bee-whisperer in front.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Since it was a nice day my bees were happy, the apples are beginning to bloom (bees absolutely adore apple blossoms) and of course loads of dandy-lions everywhere we seem to have a bumper crop this year.
I set out to clean up my poor starved dead hive #1 and check the feed levels in my other two hives #6 and #3. So I'm standing there watching robbers go in and out of my poor hive #1 and thinking to myself this was odd, I get the cover off and see some dead bees on the bottom but the "robbing" activity was still going on, bees crawling all over the three meager frames I had collected from this small hives cut-out a few days ago, so now I'm thinking man this is imposable this hive is dead, I saw dead bees covering these same frames yesterday. So I check for a queen and lo and behold you will never guess what I found! She was alive imposable! I thought they all looked dead unmoving, I have never seen this before, I'm not sure how much brood survived though.. Still, I rushed inside to get a feeder and fill it with syrup, I placed it close to the brood nest giving them only 4 top bars including the ones from the cut-out. It will be interesting to see how they build up from here, I was surprised they wintered in such a small cluster to begin with, but this Lazarus act is simply incredible. Next time I will check more closely, its a good thing I waited to clean them out! I was so exited, when I thought they were dead I felt so bad for having killed such a tough determined feral colony, they had survived a bad winter so well with so few bees, they must have been from a late swarm.
Bees are amazing!
Monday, May 10, 2010
Today's high 10c, low was 2c.The last three or so days have been very bad for forage, wet cold and windy, mainly cold.
I was getting worried about my bees especially the smallest hive I had just installed from a cut-out on the 5th of May. Today I was able to check the feed levels inside my three hives, and unfortunately the smallest one hive #1 was indeed dead, it was a small colony to begin with, plus I'm new to feeding my bees I had placed the feeder to far back (4 or 5 top bars) from the brood nest so they could not find it.. At least that's what I think happened, it is possible they perished before then and I didn't realise, robers tend to check even empty hives making the hive appear active when in fact it isn't.
The other hives I retrieved from the most recent cut-outs #3 and #6 are doing well, #3 was the largest and was installed on may the 3rd, this is the one I removed in the rain. hive #3 had almost completed one whole comb from what I could see, I didn't do an inspection just peeked around the feeder so they probably completed two combs since I couldn't see the front and I had left an empty bar up front. Anyway lesson learned keep the feeders close to the broodnest!
It is still early in the season so I might be able to get two nukes from these hives depending on how fast they build up.
This is my custom designed bee vacuum. What I did was build a fairly standard vacuum, the clear hose deposits bees into a screened cage, the vacuum is created by a small leaf blower in reverse there is a throttle to get the vacuum speed down far enough so it wont kill bees. The whole thing is fited into a bucket by a groove I routed in the lid so that the inside chamber is nearly air tight.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
The weather has been really unpredictable so far this year, april was nice and warm early and may is starting to look cold and wet. I got a call last week about this house that has three bee hives in it, it's had bees for twenty odd years, upon inspection the bees were behind a strip of cedar trim about 24" wide at the top of brickwork walls about 15 to 20 feet up. Once I got some of the trim off you could see almost the entire width of the house had comb under that trim. You can see the sections formed by those 6" studs, each one had a colony at some time in the past.
I removed the first colony the same day I did the inspection, took me something like five hours. Then I had to wait for some good weather to do another cut-out, what I thought was nice weather came on may 4th, well the first part went alright I had moved enough broodnest and bees to keep it warm into my 2' nuc when it started to rain! So I'm scrambling to get things covered up, I ended up doing the final part of the cut-out in pouring rain. The nuc was safe under some plastic and the hive was safe under the eaves but I was cold and wet 15' up in the air on a ladder. Fortunately I brought my new bee-vac (my own design) and it was working famously so I was able to get all the bees AND the queen. Not the best day to do a cut-out but it all turned out ok.
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