My life, on line!
Me and the bees!
Beekeeping in the Far North!
THE LAKE HOUSE BEES!
05 years
by Amy
in Me and the bees!
Yesterday we inspected the bees at the lake, these are the hives that we moved not so long ago. Moving hives is a bit like moving all the students in one school to another school where everything is different. The bees need time to find their way around, first they have to re-orientate to the new location. We placed sticks in front of our relocated hives so the foraging bees don’t just take wing and get lost because they don’t know the new hive location is, instead they take the time to have a look and get their bearings before they go out.
Then they have to investigate the entire area in a three Km radius from the hive, they need to find where there are sources for water, nectar, pollen and tree sap, this would have been tough on my bees because of the drought, I haven’t seen a dandelion for AGES so I was worried that they would be starving. Plus it’s a really windy location which will also affect the bees.
BUT! The hives are doing very well, they had plenty of stores, we saw nearly every queen, they all had brood (baby bees in cocoons) lava and eggs, they looked quite happy! We put varroa strips in the hives for their Autumn/Winter treatment and put two of the hives up on vented bases which should make them even happier, it was good to see the bees doing so well at our new home!
Bee brood or babies!
Pollen, bees feed their babies with this.
Cross combing, when bees build bits of comb in weird ways!
ATTACK IN THE DARK!
05 years
by Amy
in Me and the bees!
On the 7th of February we moved the last three hives from what was our home apiary to our new place, it DID NOT GO SMOOTHLY!
Mum woke me up at 5.30am, it was still dark and I was grumpy. Mum was all “rush, rush, rush!” and I didn’t see why, I do know that we have to move bees early in the morning so the foragers are all home and so they don’t heat up too much in the daytime temperatures but it did not mean I was happy about it!
We moved Isobelle, our biggest hive first, mum had already put the “entrance blockers” in so the bees were trapped inside, it was dark and cool so we weren’t wearing our suits and mum had her head-lamp to see with, we heaved it on a sled and dragged it up the hill, you could hear the bees in side buzzing angrily when we went over bumps. I imagined the frames inside bumping and jostling together with all the bees on them, in a hive the size of Isobelle’s there are probably 50-70 thousand bees and they were as grumpy as me!
We dragged the sled through the gateway and over the rocks, the bees were really buzzing now, not the fuzzy buzz of bees in flowers but the ominous buzz of a flash flood or a run-away bulldozer, one you can’t see but you can hear it coming! When we got to the trailer we lifted the hive up, the boxes were right by my ear and it was even louder! We managed to get the back legs onto the pallet and then we pushed to get it on all the way….we pushed the boxes right off the base!
The air filled with bees and mum yelled run!
I ran!
There were bees in my hair and on my clothes, first I went to run inside but then I thought “NO!” “They will be able to see me in there! The lights are on!” so I ran off round the house into the dark. After a while I stopped running, they had stopped following me, some were still in my hair but I either squashed them of pulled my hair out in a panic and they were gone. WHEW!
We put our suits on after that and lit the smoker, we lifted the hive back on it’s base and slipped it onto the pallet before we moved the other hives. We didn’t even take off our suits when we got in the car. NOW I know why we were up so early…just in case things happen that your not expecting.
Me sitting by Isobelle’s hive (the green one).
When we got there we unloaded the hives, we put Isobelle and Nettie’s hives beside new bases and we will lift the boxes off the old bases at a later date, these new bases won’t slide like the old ones.
Sticks to learn by.
We put sticks in front of the hives so that when the bees come out for the first time they realize we have moved them and re-orientate to their new home, otherwise they will try to go back to their old place. We will move the sticks after a few days. You can see the new bases just to the right in this picture, they are ventilated bases which are good for the bees, there are rocks behind the hives because mostly our wind comes from that direction and this way the air flows over the rocks and warms up before it gets to the hives so they don’t get cold in winter. There is cardboard on the ground so the grass won’t grow up and into the hives.