Bee Highways

Additional pictures from 17-Apr-2016

Here is one of the pictures I was talking about where the bees ate through the wax foundation near the bottom. It was whole when I put it in there and now there are only the metal threads left.

You can also see the brood pattern here is pretty solid for the area of the frame that they've already built the comb up for.

For those of you reading that don't know what brood is, it's the cocooned bee larvae that will soon become newborn bees.  At some point I'm sure I'll make a reference post where I define a whole bunch of terms but until then...

For those of you wondering, no I did not miss the fact that I had the opportunity to make a terrible pun and call my first post "New Bee-ginnings."  I just thought I'd save all the bad jokes to put all together at one time, so there.

First Expansion

17-Apr-16

Just a note, I’m probably not going to blog every time I go into the hives but I’ll try to do it whenever my wife is around to take pictures and if we catch something neat going on in there.

Hive #1

Easy FTQ (Find The Queen) here.  Wife took these with her Nikon D90 if anyone is interested.

A close up of some of the cells shows eggs, celebrate!  Though we probably knew this with some of the next pictures...

This was a neat picture with the colors and lighting.  Here’s some of their bee bread and some capped brood in the top right of the picture.

Zoomed out version of the picture, you can see the queen and the capped brood.  Hope it’s staying plenty warm with those bees on top of the cappings.  Something I noticed that this hive was doing that the 2nd hive was not as much was eating the wax near the bottom of my frames to make little passages from frame to frame instead of walking around the outside of the frames.

I swear that if I wasn’t IN some of these photos I’d swear that they were stock photos off the internet (They’re not).

Hive #2

This picture shows how well they’re taking up space on some of the frames; approximately 70% of the frame was covered with them.

Some really bright orange pollen I noticed on one of my girls’ legs.  No idea where it came from but it’s neat looking.  The picture above is a much harder FTQ if you’re up for it :)

A good bit of activity at the front gates of the hives after it started to warm up a bit and after I finished screwing with them.  Hopefully we’ll see how they build up into the top boxes.  I did end up checkerboarding some of the frames into the top box to try to get the queen to move around a bit.

New Beginnings

29-Mar-2016

Unpackaging 6 pounds of bees!  This is me removing the queen cage from Hive #1 (Queen Mot)

Struggling with the metal plate over the candy...Wearing gloves may be good for my hands but it’s definitely a pain to work with them on.  Once the queen cage was suspended in the hive (via rubberband)...

Shake. Them. Out.  You haven’t lived til you’ve heard a mass of bees upset by being thrown out of the only home they’ve known.  

Time for the wife to take a selfie.

Repeat above steps til Hive #2 (Queen Hai) is set up as well.  We promise that the next time we take pictures it’ll be with something a little better than a camera phone :p