Jeff Harris, from Clarenville, Newfoundland, dropped off some photos and video of one of his swarms from July 18th, 2011. I plan to do everything I can to avoid swarms where I live. Even though the bees are their most docile in this state, I got a feeling most people in my urban ‘hood would not react well to seeing my bees swarm like this. I’ll leave it to Jeff to tell us about it in the comments.
Note to urban beekeepers: Don’t call them swarms. You want to keep your neighbours’ freak-out factor to a minimum. Call them splinter colonies instead.
THE FOLLOWING WAS LAST UPDATED ON FEB. 16, 2012.
More dead bees are showing up on the bottom of the foundationless hive, enough to nearly clog the entire bottom entrance. (I first noticed the dead bees on December 22nd.) Most of the them appear to be drones.
Are drones fed like the queen, or can they access and eat honey on their own? I don’t remember. If they rely on the workers to be fed, then my guess is they’re deliberately being starved out of the hive. I’m surprised so many are still around.
I’ve also noticed that the bees in the foundationless hive are clustering heavily in the bottom box. This is what the edge of the cluster looked like a few days ago during the Dry Sugar Feeding (I fed them even though I don’t think they’re running low on honey):
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I’m not sure if it has something to do with today’s date (the winter solstice), a recent snowfall or just business as usual, but a pile of dead bees suddenly appeared at the bottom entrance of our foundationless hive today. I wouldn’t have noticed them if we were using a solid mouse-proof entrance reducer instead of the open mouse-proofing mesh. The dead bees would have stayed piled up inside the hive all winter.
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I could still see the cluster poking up through the middle of the top bars in the upper brood chamber. All three of the conventional hives look the same as they did last week, clustering high in the top brood chamber and hardly any dead bees on the bottom board.
I wonder what it all means. Probably nothing.
UPDATE (Dec. 23/11): I just took a closer look at the dead bees. About 90% of them are drones. The foundationless hive always had a large number of drones and not all of them were booted outside in the fall. This must be the last of them.
Continued in Dead Bees and High & Low Clusters.
(It’s a slow news day here at Mud Songs.) I know everyone has been on edge waiting for the results of the Cloudy Honey taste test. Does clarifying a jar of cloudy honey in a bowl of hot water destroy the floral flavours and aromas? Does it make the honey taste like grocery store goo? I don’t know. I haven’t done the taste test yet. But stay glued to your computer. We hope to have the results in this weekend. In the meantime, I’ll answer another question I’m sure has been on everyone’s mind: “Phillip, what are your bees up to these days?” I don’t know. But let’s find out… Okay, I just got back from taking a few pictures of the bees. Check it out:
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| Top entrance from a first-year hive (Dec. 16/11). |
Jürgen Tautz’s The Buzz About Bees: Biology of a Superorganism is similar to The Backyard Beekeeper by Kim Flottum in that it’s full of detailed photographs that will help new beekeepers identify virtually everything that happens inside a honey bee hive.
But it’s not about beekeeping. It’s about the evolution and behaviour of honey bees. I learned much about the behaviour of honey bees from Mark L. Winston’s The Biology of the Honey Bee. That book had me spellbound. The Buzz About Bees (the book deserves a less cutesy title, by the way) goes over some of the same ground, explains a few extra things and presents another means of apprehending the behaviour of honey bees, that is, thinking of the honey bee colony as a single organism: the “superorganism.”
I don’t have time to write a detailed review of the book, but I’ll tell you what I got from reading it.
Read on . . . »
For those who haven’t seen it before, here’s a worker bee pulling out a couple corpses from the hive.
Nothing beats the Expulsion of the Drones though.
Do you have any idea what these bees are doing?
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More of these photos can be viewed in the Bees in the Dark photo album. Here’s what it looks like on video:
Read on . . . »
Our four honey bee colonies exploded with life today and brought in loads of pollen from somewhere; we don’t know where. Here’s the video:
In other news, we’re feeding our bees back their own honey — capped and partially capped honey from the honey supers. We scraped off the cappings and installed the frames over the inner covers. The bees go mad for it. We’ve given them back about a dozen frames so far, probably close to 30 pounds of honey. We could have kept it for ourselves, but we’re happy with the 40 or so pounds they’ve already given us, which is more than we expected anyway.
THE FOLLOWING HAS BEEN UPDATED SINCE ORIGINALLY POSTED.
Whenever the bees have a chance to do anything that contributes to the survival of the colony, they do it, even if it kills them. After a week of not doing much of anything in freezing cold weather, the bees came pouring out of hives this morning, many of them coming back loaded down with pollen.
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I don’t know where they found the pollen, but I’m impressed. Here’s a cropped-in grainy shot:
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It looked as if the bees were shutting down for winter, but give them some early morning sunshine and temperatures hovering a little over 10°C (50°F), and away they go, making the most of what little warm temperatures are left in this year. And where is all this pollen coming from? A late-blooming field of Goldenrod must be close by. I don’t know.
I posted a few more photos in the Bees & Pollen photo album. Some videos may show up later on too. (Update: Here’s the video.)
Read on . . . »
Drones don’t make honey. They only eat it. They also contribute nothing to the survival of the colony during the winter months. Hence, most drones are expelled from the hive in the fall as the temperatures begin to drop. Sometimes the worker bees will even chew out the remaining drone brood in the hive and toss the drone pupae out the front door (see Piles of Dead Pupae). Gross. Honey bees don’t mess around when it comes to their survival. Here’s a video I took this morning of several drones being expelled from Hive #1:
If you watched carefully, you may have noticed worker bees riding around on the drones like bucking broncos, biting and pinching them; at one point a worker bee grabbed hold of a drone and got taken for a ride in the sky; another worker bee tried to fly away with a drone; and many of the worker bees surrounded more than a few drones and pestered them until they were gone. And one drone got dragged out already dead. Good times.
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