One sad shot of the dead swarm.
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One sad shot of the dead swarm.
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Sorry for your loss, but sounds like things are going well now, which is great. The more I read your thread the more I would love to have a hive. Those little guys are awesome.
oh man,, this bums me out,,, sorry Ycc.Originally Posted by your_comforting_company
It broke my heart too, but some things are just beyond our control. Nature has a way of humbling us like that. You just have to take it in stride and call it "learning".
Got busy building frames and painting hive bodies today, so I didn't finish the swarm bucket. Will finish it over the next day or two and post pics. Got two more possible colonies to relocate at some point before the nectar flow goes out in 9 months HAHAHA.
Gotta love the south and our long growing season.
My plan at this point is to get the suffering colony established, trap out one of the relocation colonies using my new queen and slack hive. That reminds me.. I made a bee escape trap today too.. will post pics of it and the swarm-bucket in the next few days, and explain how it works. Any bees I can add to that suffering colony will improve their odds of making a comeback.
You like making stuff so here's another project for your list. I saw this some time back on a TV show.
http://www.beesource.com/build-it-yourself/bee-vac/
http://www.beesource.com/files/beevac.pdf
Tracks Across the High Plains...Death on the Bombay Line...A Touch of Death and Mayhem...Dead Rock...The Griswald Mine Boys...All On Amazon Books.
That's a pretty neat contraption. Thanks Rick! I'll have to build one just for kicks!
A quick update without pics. New queen took right up to the suffering colony and a peek inside yesterday, revealed the bees grooming and building comb. I've been feeding them sugar-syrup because I don't see nearly as many foragers as I feel like they need, mostly because so many of them are still hatchlings that have not matured to be able to fly yet.
ACE hardware uptown has a nice little "car vac" that will work well with the bee vac. Just gotta save up $35 for the motor and the bee-vac will be in business! http://www.acehardware.com/product/i...628083.1259528
I've also come into some info about a product called "bee-gone". It's a liquid normally used to usher bees out of honey supers so you can collect the honey frames. It smells exactly like chicken manure farmers put out on their corn and it should also rightly be named "people-gone" too cause it smells like H-E-double-hockey-stick!
I will probably get a few drops from one of my keeper friends, apply it to some cotton balls and drop them into the colony that's in the brick pillar on a porch where neighbors son lives. Used in conjunction with the bee-escape, I might even get the queen to come out.
So many experiments and different ways to do things... Sometimes it's hard to decide which direction to go!
Updated pics of the swarm-catching-bucket:
I used my Weller soldering gun with the "hot knife" attachment to cut the circle from the lid, and a bernzomatic torch to heat a nail to poke holes for sewing the screen in place with wire. It's really a very simple project and yours doesn't have to be nearly this fancy.
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Completed lid, I left some loops in my stitches for hanging things like a queen cage (pictured). If you can catch the queen in a swarm, you will have lots of luck in getting the rest of the bees. I will likely modify this screen to include a one-way entrance.
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Hope that helps make sense of the bucket. Not much to it. Forgot to take pics of the bee escape.
Couldn't resist posting a pic of the healthy colony. This was on an afternoon that was about 95 degrees out. I had wondered if this was typical behavior; apparently if it's too hot inside, bees will move outside to make room for air flow. This is my original nuc colony that has literally exploded from (just a guess on the numbers) somewhere around 3000 bees to probably 10,000 bees in the scant few weeks since I brought them home.
notice the Rumex acetocella on the right hand side of the entrance.
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Requeening the suffering colony. These pics are several days old by now.
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Cool pics as usual.
What is the purpose of the queen cage? Is it just to acclimatize the colony to the queen without actually letting them get to her?
On the bee vac, I also saw one that was made out of a vacuum truck for sucking prairie dogs out of their holes!!!! Just stick the hose down the hole and zoooooooop! instant prairie dog.
Tracks Across the High Plains...Death on the Bombay Line...A Touch of Death and Mayhem...Dead Rock...The Griswald Mine Boys...All On Amazon Books.
Just to quickly clarify what I think are "unnecessary" cuts:
This is what's called a top-wedge style. The lateral cut is for the removable wedge, cut out with a utility knife. Foundation is inserted and wedge nailed back in place to hold the hooks on top.
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I really think this 1/16" bevel is unnecessary and the ones I made myself work equally as well as these prefab frames
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Foundation being placed in the bottom rail. Top wedge has been removed, and hopefully you can see the hooks on the top of the foundation.
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Yes. If a "strange" queen is just released into the hive, chances are good that she will be killed.
I saw a strange queen in Vancouver once. He was dressed all in white. Even his face was painted white. He did have a nice gown on though.
Tracks Across the High Plains...Death on the Bombay Line...A Touch of Death and Mayhem...Dead Rock...The Griswald Mine Boys...All On Amazon Books.
That was probably the queen that traveled from Mexico to Vancouver. Had it not been for the cage as "she" passed through Texas, "she" may have been killed.
In that case, it is more like a shark cage than a mode of transportation haha!
I was warned to keep an eye on her to make sure the workers didn't ball her up. I monitored for about 4 hours watching whether they were nursing her or not. You can watch them stick out their strawlike mouth parts and share with her. This colony had been queenless for too long to NOT want a new queen, but it's still good judgement to protect her to make sure they are accepting. A colony can reject a queen, as Crash pointed out and evict or kill her. The cage that hangs in the bucket is so that if I can find the queen in a swarm (you have to be pretty lucky as well as observant) I can cage her and hang her in a new hive and the colony will enter and start building under the illusion that she has accepted the home. Once they start building, she will accept their comb almost undoubtedly.
Bees are kinda picky.. except the guy bees.. they're like "whatever, honey!"
While the picture above would appear that the workers were trying to get to her to "ball her up" if that were the case, almost every bee in the hive would be on that cage. Ultimately, I just used my superhuman powers of observation to see them nursing her and going back to the sugar-water. Them babies wanted a new mama.
Been a while since I did an inspection on my original nuc colony, so Saturday I opened 'er up to see what kind of progress they were making on their honey stores and check for signs of pests or disease. A few good shots:
This is the first honey pot I added a few weeks ago. all frames are completely drawn, very near completely filled, and probaly 60% capped for honey stores. This is the outermost frame of the honey super (which must weigh as much as a bundle of shingles by now).
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Frame 2L
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Frame 6L You'll notice the extra drone cells along the bottom of this honey frame. I assume that the bees are setting beetle / mite traps along the "dead space" as sacrificial or hygeinic behavior.
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For the salvaged colony, which has been relocated to trap out some bees from an old house, I stole a frame of brood (see post above). They have drawn the inside of the frame and are working hard on the outside side. The inside had a few day-old eggs, which I could use to raise queens if I knew anything about that.. maybe next year.
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It's hard to tell from this pic, but the hive is FULL of bees. Population must have tripled or quadrupled since the last inspection.
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This frame is being used for pollen stores, mostly. Along the top you can see capped honey, and on the right side, capped brood. All the cells that appear empty are packed with pollen.
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This is the kind of density that is our primary goal. With this many bees on a frame, constantly cleaning and tending, it's darn near impossible for a mite or beetle to do any damage.
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Good pic of drones (males) on a worker brood frame. One has just emerged from the cell that has been chewed open. There are two males in this picture, can you spot them?
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While this frame appears empty, the queen is making her way from cell to cell placing new eggs in a frame of freshly hatched workers. Can you spot the queen in this pic?
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Just a couple cool shots of one of the girls foraging on some lillies
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I'll go tomorrow to check the status of the salvaged (lure) colony up at the farm, more pics of that to come (and probably some better explaining of the process). Been a busy week and terribly hot.
Enjoy!
Bee escape / Luring and a few neato pics
As promised, I got some pics to share of the bee escape and lure hive. I'll throw a couple neat pictures in here too.
Late in the evening the ladies were just hanging out:
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Unless you open the hive, you really have nothing to fear. When just watching, this is how much "protective gear" I wear... even when less than 2 feet away from the entrance.
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The First thing you have to do when attempting to "trap out" bees, is close all the entrances and exits, except for one. I chose to use screen wire so that air could still circulate through the hive, but the bees cannot get back in any of their extra entrances.
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At the top exit, I fashioned a screen cone, about 18" long reinforced with wire. The wire helps hold the cone in position without sagging. The principle is simple. When bees leave their hive, they crawl to the exit and fly directly out in a more-or-less straight line, but when they return, they generally land on the wall, or landing strip, walk over to the entrance hole and re-enter. The cone prevents them from reaching the entrance. (while they are smart critters, they are definately not the smartest) The big end is roughly 6" diameter and the small exit end is roughly 3/8". You can tell by the cluster of bees above that they can't figure out how to get back in.
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The colony I salvaged is in the hive next to the exit. When the bees cannot figure out how to return to their queen, they'll go to the next available "home" with a leader. In this case, it's a ready hive with a new queen less than a foot from exit of the cone. I tried to get pictures of the (we'll call them feral even though they are just as gentle as my original) Feral bees assimilating with the salvaged colony, but they are so fast entering and exiting that most of them turned out blurry.. Sorry, but this is the best one I could get. The yellow blurs are the feral ladies joining the new queen.
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I was wearing just as much protective gear as above when I opened this hive to check the status of the queen and population. After a week, I would say I've added a few hundred bees to my colony. I found a small hole that I hadn't blocked last weekend, so after some minor blocking efforts, I felt that it was as good as I could do without tearing down the porch. The queen inside was healthy and I got to witness her laying eggs in an empty cell, though I didn't get to take a picture. I did get to share with the homeowner what a frame of bees and the queen looks like.. He's more happy to be working toward a front porch he can use LOL!
Anyhow, the cone is a simple concept. Using a homemade compass you simply draw a circle with a radius equal to the length of the cone. Draw an arc. In my case, the arc has a radius of 18".
The length of the arc is determined by how big you want the finished product. The large end of the cone needed to be 6" so I multiplied that by Pi (3.14) to get 18.84" or 19", then add an inch for sewing the thing together, so my arc length was 20". Same rules apply for the small end (0.375 x Pi = 1.18 or 1-1/4" plus lap).
Wire it together along the straight edges of the cone and you have it.
The main problem I saw was that when it was positioned at an angle, the bees couldn't figure out how to get out because they naturally leave in a straight line. Once I added a piece of wire and pulled it over perpendicular to the exit, they started pouring out.
I will most definately not get the queen out of this colony, as it is highly unlikely that she will abandon her eggs until most of the workers are found absent and pests begin to take over. Since it takes 16 days for a worker to hatch and another 13 days until they will leave the colony to forage, this will be a long ongoing process. If the queen continues to lay, I can expect new nurses to hatch that often. In other words, it'll be another week before the non-flying hatchlings that were present when I set up the trap last weekend will ever exit the colony.. Without more explanation I'm sure you can understand that it will be a long process.
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. Helen Keller
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Awesome looking stuff. Watching your bees evolve is pretty interesting.
"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
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Okra, Squash, and cucumbers are doing very well. Bees can be spotted all over the garden even before sunrise. With the drought in place, I must consider myself very lucky to live near a swampy area. A common roadside weed in my area that blooms this time of year and happens to like growing near swampy-wet areas is Great Rose Mallow (Hibiscus grandiflorus) also called by some "wild okra".
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I've spotted my bees on flowers in the ditch a few hundred yards from here, and on a dirt road on the way to work, I've spotted small german bees in them.
An unrelated note, I've also spotted wild potato vines (Ipomoea pandurata)growing and blooming in the same places as the wild okra (as grandma calls it)
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Not a good sign... This is from my healthy colony. One or two beetles is expected, but this many has me worried.
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A fellow down at the lake called and said his fishing shack was infested with bees, so I went yesterday to check it out. This feral colony is apparently NOT africanized. Africanized bees have been found as close to my house now as Bainbridge (22 miles from here), as well as in Albany. Genetic testing has confirmed that the two cases were africanized, both of which resulted in death.
This colony is not aggressive so I feel safe to say they are italians. I took these pictures barefoot and wearing no shirt, and as close as 2 feet from their entrance. My oldest boy went with me, but he had a banana for snack yesterday so he wouldn't approach. No stings or aggressive behavior is a good sign that this is a strong, yet well behaved colony. I did get bumped once or twice, but keep in mind I was blocking their flight path, so that's understandable.
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Going to rig up another bee-escape and use my non-standard hive to house them. The gentleman gave me full permission to remove siding as needed to get the bees out. I hope to be able to find the queen, cage her, and hang her inside the hive, luring her daughters into the hive, then disassemble the wall to remove the comb, and put it in cages in that hive. Sounds like a better plan than scrapping the non-standard hive. Wish me luck!
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. Helen Keller
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