Napping Children + Good Weather = A Tip to Visit the Bees!

I couldn't resist. After lunch all three of my babes passed out... hard. I just know these are going to be killer naps. (They are still sleeping as I type.) Everyone was up early, everyone played hard, and everyone ate good lunches. I almost succumbed to a siesta myself. But, with three dead-to-the-world sleepers and the first sunny day without 30mph gusting winds I thought I'd better take my chance and get out to see the bees. 


As soon as I had made up my mind I got extremely nervous. I'm not sure what induces the thrill, but each time I know I'm going to have a bee-encounter my blood pressure picks up and I have to go to the bathroom a few times before I can get on my suit. (TMI for sure, but that's life. And I think it will be funny to remember years from now that I could check on the bees without several trips to the potty first.) Anyway, once my guts settled down I went to work lighting the smoker. As the flames began to lick around the canister, I got my gear around while going through a check list of all the things I might need and all the things I was going to look for once I got into the hives. I love the process of gearing-up to go out to see the bees. It is a process both mental and physical, and I found the whole thing soothing. 

In to my basket went my camera, bee brush, hive tool, bars fitted with hair clips... check, check, check! Finally I zipped myself into the suit, puffed on the smoker a couple of times to check for cool white smoke (you don't want flames shooting out of the end to singe your bees!) and off I went down the hill to visit with my favorite six-legged honey-making amigas. 


My purpose for visiting the hives was different for each colony. I wanted to check in on the old bees and see if a new queen had hatched from the queen cell they made and if I could find any evidence of her laying. According to some more experienced beekeepers on a forum I read, even if they could raise a new queen their chances of survival are grim because their numbers are so low that even if a queen started laying brood, the house bees aren't numerous enough to cover the babies and keep them at the right toasty temperature. What I need to do is combine the two colonies, but it was nice today to be able to open up that box and not be overwhelmed by the sheer volume the sound of thousands of bees hard at work. (I'm sure someday that sound will be like music to my ears, but right now it is a little intimidating, I won't lie.) 


The swarm colonie however: Wow! What a sound. They are some feisty girls too! Despite a generous (but not too generous) application of smoke the roar that came out of that hive was crazy!!! I had a couple fly out of the hive and ping me in the face too. Thank you kick-ass bee suit, no stingers in my flesh today! I really didn't want to mess with these ladies. It wasn't their demeanor, but more so because I want to leave them alone to do what bees do, make honey and more bees! However, after the last cross-comb nightmare, I wanted to reassure myself that they were building in the right direction. Thank god they were. It looks like they are working to attach the comb I gave them on clips to the bar. There was a TINY little bit of new comb, and it was attached nicely  to a bar. Yea! Go bees! I didn't look for the queen, or check for food stores or eggs. I'll go back in a week to check on their progress. For now I'm just content knowing that they are building in the right direction.

How did those leaves blow in there is what I want to know? The all the openings to the hive are a quarter inch or less! 

 It was after my visit to the swarm colony that I opened up the sad little package colony. Every time I look in there there are less and less bees. It is so sad. Today, it was clear that I won't have bees in there much longer. The only queen cell they had looked like the bottom had been chewed out of it. I would have been excited about that except their seemed to be a dead (unmoving) bee inside of it head first. I don't know much about anything, but that doesn't seem promising to me.  In a week... or less if I can manage it I am going to take the comb from the sad hive and place it and any bees still on it in the other hive. (There will be a mechanism to introduce the new bees slowly, but I'm not going to get into the technical bit of that just now.) If nothing else, it will save the swarm bees a ton of work to have those combs. 

All the house bees left in this hive are between these two combs. It's a sad sad sight. I also saw a bunch of drones.

So, that's it. I'm feeling pretty good about the whole thing. It was actually a small victory just getting the smoker going without assistance. Smoochy is the resident pyro, so he's fired up the smoker on all other occasions. Of course, I did manage to burn the crap out of the tip of my pinky finger while trying to pry the thing open after I was done using it today. If the smoker cools with the lid on the resin makes it stick. I was yanking and yanking on it after my trip out and the thing just didn't want to open. (Maybe because I was trying to open it from the wrong end? Duh!) Than POW! My finger slipped right between the wires of the protective cage. Ouch! I almost think I'd have preferred a bee sting. It would have been less embarrassing.