The following video isn’t for everyone. Eventually I’ll set up some contraption that will allow me to get close up shots of the bees in flight. I don’t have an expensive camera or any kind of fancy gear, and the angle isn’t the greatest, but you might enjoy this video if you’re truly obsessed with honey bees.
The sound of the bees plays at normal speed.
I took the entrance reducer off this hive earlier today. The bees were moderately active. Then it cooled off later in the afternoon and the bees slowed down. So I put the entrance reducer back on. About half an hour later, the small entrance became blocked with bees. My guess is I didn’t account for the foragers that were still on the way back to the hive. They seemed to come back all at once. That’s when I should have had the camera rolling. It was intense.
Wow, so much pollen on their legs! I like the way they are kind of transparent when they fly right in front of the camera. And the way they sometimes do somersaults when they land. And the ones that crawled right on the lens. Not to mention when one seems to fly off to the side of the microphone, so the sound is as if she’s flying to the right of my computer – as if she were right in my house!
Very cool.
I just watched this video for the first time. It’s cool watching it in full screen. Too bad I can’t get the resolution any higher. I’m still working on that.
I chose five minutes of audio (at normal speed) from the original 20 minutes of footage. I didn’t realize until now that I picked audio that had me messing with the camera and making adjustments. At one point I say, “That’s cool.” I’m glad I didn’t say anything incriminating.
I will try this again once I figure out how to upload a higher resolution video. It’s kind of interesting, isn’t it? I’ll try it when the bees are more active next time.
It’s 20°C in the backyard now (at 1pm). (The weather widget in the sidebar is way off.)
I just did a full inspection and move of Hive #1 (I moved the hive about 2 feet, further from a pathway). It went well. The bees were disoriented, but I see already most of them are oriented to the new location.
The top brood box was full of capped brood, open brood and a few frames of honey and pollen. There’s not much room for the queen to lay in that box, but the bottom box was completely empty. Every frame was bare. So as long as she has enough sense to move to that box, I have no worries about swarming.
No swarm cells spotted. They still have plenty of work to do to fix in that empty box.
I’ll post a video sometime later today or this evening.