Airplane Lured Bees

Waterloo Evening Courier
July 12, 1919, Waterloo, Iowa
Airplane Lured Bees.
Popular Bluff, Mo.

One of the largest apiaries in the state was robbed of half its million bees recently when an airplane from Park Field, Tenn., Passed over the bee farm of Martin Polk, near Patterson, Mo., with a large bouquet of magnolias. Scenting the rich fragrance of the flowers, the bees swarmed from their hives and began the pursuit of the sugar-scented airplane, which was on the way to the funeral of a former lieutenant of aviation. Fully a million bees are estimated to have followed the airplane. When last seen the bees, forming a large cloud against the sky, were pursuing the plane in a westward direction. They are known to have followed the plane at least 20 miles, and they have not returned to Popular Bluff yet.

thanks to Historical Honeybee

 

Nice observation hive. If anyone has any info on where this is or how and why it was built...let me know.

Распечатыватель.avi

I found this along with what may be instructions for constructing this ingenious thing or perhaps some translated Russian poetry or Soviet secret code.

knife with a water-steam
This knife never seen.
Pay attention because it is different.
Thin steel cables have a special place.
Midle on knives.
Two sides are under the knife.
What is shown is a functional prototype.
It's just part of a larger device that can not be displayed, for obvious reasons.
All that stands in the place where they were resolved, and unopened and open frame, and another ...... I think that is enough.

There she is...

someone sent me a link to this video of a beekeeper in Louisiana catching a swarm and then later luring the swarm onto his hand by holding the queen in a queen clip.  The bees move to be close to their queen.  I have watched all 43 of his videos where he catches swarms in various rooftops, birdhouses, and other spots.  He uses no gloves or veil and calmly scoops clumps of bees up into his bare hand searching for the queen before he dumps them into a waiting box.  My favorite part, listen for it, is where he says in his lovely Cajun drawl, "There she is."  when he spots the queen. 

From Ocean Depths

Galveston Daily News
July 13, 1900, Galveston, Texas

From Ocean Depths.     Peculiar Find of P. J. MeNeel at High Island.

Mr. P. J. McNeel of High Island made an unusual find on the beach at that point a few days ago which made him a richer man by several dollars. The Beach for several yards was strewn with beeswax aggregating about 500 pounds in weight. It is not a usual thing for beeswax to float ashore, and as beeswax is not a product of the sea, Mr. McNeel was puzzled as to the source of his find. Being of an inquisitive turn of mind, he investigated and some ancient history was resurrected.

It seems that about forty-six years ago -some old inhabitant may fix the time at fourty-six years and one month -a Spanish vessel from Mexico bound for some Mexican port to New York, sunk off High Island
coast. Part of her cargo was beeswax, and after remaining at the bottom of the ocean for nearly half a century it finally drifted ashore. The wax in fine condition and Mr. McNeel found little difficulty in
disposing of it at a good figure. thanks to Historical Honeybee

Bee Wearing Contest

"This might be your worst nightmare, but in Shaoyang, China, it's just part of an annual tradition.

The annual bee-wearing contest didn't exactly attract a swarm of entrants, but two Chinese apiarists competed to see who could attract the most bugs to their bodies in an hour-long contest, the BBC reported.

Contenstants wore nothing but shorts, goggles, and nose plugs, and stood on a scales so that the weight of the bees could be calculated.

Each contestant attracted the bees by locking a queen bee in a small cage and tying it to his body.

The victor? 42-year old Wang Dalin, who added about 52 pounds of bees to his frame..."

see more photos at huffpo

Inspired Beeing

"After 15 years of hibernation, my uncle’s beekeeping net sits ready for action. My Backpack – complete with three months of clothes, sleeping bag, sleeping pad, and a mobile modem – weighs in at 30 lbs. My pith helmet is tied to my bag, locked and loaded.   Its June 2011. I am 24, and I just quit my job and purchased a plane ticket to Turkey. My mission: to study honey bees in the country’s wild, remote, and beautiful Northeast..."

follow this amazing and beautifully photographed journey  here

Alex Wild Bee Photographs

Alex Wild is a biologist at the University of Illinois where he studies the evolutionary history of various groups of insects. He conducts photography as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work.
see his work here

Honey Cave

Extraordinary Bee Stories Spoken With Solemn Truth
=====
The San Saba News
December 9, 1920, San Saba, Texas

Big Honey Cave Sought in Texas; Engineer is Here to Locate the Place.

Fort Worth, Texas, Dec. 1. —The quest of the golden honey cave has begun in Southwest Texas.

Wild bees, for 2000 years or more, have been storing it up in a cavern until 100,000,000 pounds of honey are concealed somewhere. Its value is estimated at a million dollars.

E. B. Rees, engineer, representing a honey refining company, has arrived here to take up the hunt for
the bee cave. If the deposits, centuries  old, can be located, a refinery will be established and the honeyed sweetness extracted and bottled for commercial use.

The clew, upon which Rees was sent into the Southwest on his search, came from a magazine "filler" which told of the existence of the honey cave in the "Devil's River country around Menard."

However, when Rees arrived in Fort Worth, he discovered the Devil's River country was not in the Menard environs, so he appealed to the local newspapers to help him in his search for the bee cave.

Finally it was located on Brady Creek, near the San Saba and  McCulloch boundaries. The honey
deposit is in a cave, it is thought, far above the river and Rees will go there this week to investigate.

Some years ago, it is said, an effort was made by enterprising West Texans to solve the honey cave
mystery on Brady Creek.  A man, carrying a heavy charge of dynamite, was lowered over the
side of the cliff until he was opposite the entrance to the honey cave around which the bees were swarming. He tossed in the explosive, but the fuse, incorrectly set, burned out prematurely and the dynamite charge cut the rope. The man was thrown to the bottom of the cliff and seriously injured. No further effort has been made to secure the honey.

Information to Rees is that the honey cave is centuries old. In fact, it was first reported by the Spanish
missionaries and soldiers who penetrated into the San Saba and Menard sections and founded pioneer missions and forts. The gigantic and aged honeycombs hang from the cavern roof and weigh tons upon tons. The honey has never been disturbed.

Rees has equipment for protection against bees in the event he finds the cave. A suit similar to a deep
sea diver's and equipment with air carrying apparatus is employed in exploring the bee caverns and caves.

thanks to Historical Honeybee

Brandt Automation Bee Hive Foundation Frame Assembler

Wish I had one of these when I built all my frames by hand.

"An indexing conveyor is used to move the frame through 8 stations of assembly. The base of the foundation is placed at station 1 onto plastic clips that will hold the frame in position for the downstream stations. The base is glued and the side bars are stapled into place on stations 2 & 3. Station 4 is where the top of the side bars are glued. The plastic foundation insert is placed on station 5 and supported to station 6 where the final bar is placed on top of the glue that was applied at station 4. The final bar is stapled on station 7 and the completed frame is unloaded on station 8. Finished parts are lined up on an exit rack awaiting inspection. This machine is capable of producing a finished part every 5 seconds."



For more information please contact...
Brandt Automation, Inc.
768 7th Street South Delano
MN 55328
763-972-8888
www.brandtautomation.com

Affection of Bees

The Republican Compiler
May 10, 1847, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Affection of Bees.

An elderly lady at Nantes, who had an estate in the neighborhood of that town, where she used generally to pass the summer, had a remarkable partiality for bees, and kept a great number of them upon her estate. She took great pleasure in attending these little insects.

Towards the end of May, 1777, this lady, having been taken ill, was conveyed to Nantes, where she died a few days after. On the day when she was to be interred, and enormous number of bees made their appearance in the house where the body lay, and settling upon the coffin, would not be driven away. A friend of the deceased, wishing to ascertain whether these were the same bees that she had taken such
tender care of when living, repaired immediately to the estate, where he found all the hives emptied
of their inhabitants.

thanks to Historical Honeybee

grizzly

Algona Advance
November 28, 1907, Algona, Iowa

One of California's Big Bears Makes Raid in Ventura County.
From the Los Angeles Times

Last night a giant grizzly destroyed an entire apiary at the head of Matilija Canyon, four miles foot the famed Ortega Rancho, in Ventura county, gorging himself with honey, and went lumbering up the mountain side, leaving tracks fourteen inches long.

This morning the apiarist found crushed stands and masses of honey strewn about where his forty hives had stood, and was so frightened that he ran to Ortega's without a hat. Many hunters on horseback started on bruin's trail, but he has evaded them.

The scene of the depredation is not many miles from the place where Captain Allen Kelly laid hold of Monarch, the great beast now in Golden Gate park, in 1889, and, owing to the immense size of the
tracks, it is believed this may be the mate of the huge captive in, San Francisco.

It is generally believed that the California grizzly is almost extinct, and the appearance of this one where none had been heard of for many years will be a surprise to old hunters. 

The last known physical specimen of a California grizzly was shot and killed in Fresno County in 1922

more information about Monarch here

thanks to Historical Honeybee

cyberbee

A beekeeping friend posted this link on the San Francisco Beekeepers site. I have been looking at it for days now. It is full of amazing photos and information on bees from all over the world. I was particularly interested in the adaptations some bees have made to the varroa mite problem. I posted two of the photos describing these adaptations. Look on the site for more...

"cyberbee.msu.edu is a service provided by Zachary Huang, Department of Entomology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA. Formerly called www.cyberbee.net (which is now synonymous with cyberbee.msu.edu), the site was established as a portal for honey bee related information, which include honey bee biology, research and beekeeping."

best of our knowedge radio show on bees

The Wisconsin Public radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge just aired an hour long episode on honeybees on August 28th. It is a good listen.
listen to it here.

beekeeper feuds in NYC

 from the New York Times cityroom blog.

"Tropical Storm Irene moved through New York City on Sunday knocking out power, causing flooding in some neighborhoods and knocking over many trees.
In one corner of Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, the storm also set off a fight — over bees.

Andrew CotéWind ripped off a hollow tree limb in a Brooklyn park, leaving the bees unprotected; the situation developed into an ownership debate over the hive.

In a gale wind from the storm, a hollowed-out branch of an enormous tree was ripped off, exposing a hive of 30,000 to 40,000 honeybees. The hive’s discovery was a jackpot for the beekeeping community and word spread quickly on Facebook and Twitter that a feral hive was up for grabs.
Two beekeepers jumped at the chance to claim the bees, unknowingly setting off a feud between two of the city’s main beekeeping groups...read more after the jump"

Britain’s Biggest Bee Bole Wall

Beautiful stone wall and amazing find by restoration work in this National Trust Estate in Wales. 

Staff renovating a National Trust Estate in Wales have discovered Britain’s biggest bee bole wall.   The 19th century bee hives were renovated as part of work to celebrate 75 years since the Dolmelynllyn Estate, at Ganllwyd near Dolgellau, came into National Trust care.

Originally thought to contain 38 boles (alcoves where the bees were kept in baskets), eight more were discovered during the repair work, making it nearly ten times bigger than the average bee bole wall in Wales and officially the biggest in the UK.

“I can confirm that this is the largest number of bee boles recorded in one wall,” said Penny Walker of the International Bee Research Association Bee Boles Register. “This is remarkable, considering that the average number per property in Wales is 4.9 and in England 5.2.”

Each bee bole would have held a skep, a basket for bees, and although a skep was much smaller than a modern wooden hive, there must have been an unusually high concentration of bees at Dolmelynllyn.

Sadly the boles won’t be returning to their original use – modern beehives are much more healthy places to keep bees – but the wall will be open to the public as part of Dolmelynllyn’s Open Day on Sunday, June 5.

Visitors will be able to take a circular walk of the restored lake on the estate, meet local beekeepers and see vintage tractors and take part in Victorian games.

from the website  24/  found here

Daily Iowa Capital
July 26, 1884, Des Moines, Iowa

There seems scarcely a limit to the increase of bees where feed is plenty. They go with civilization and like Greeley*, they seem to favor going West. Whether thisis a rule with them in all parts of the Country we cannot say. A man who does field work told us recently that during the summer four swarms has passed over his head two of them so low that he stooped to avoid contact with them, All of these were going West, or a little south of West. Probably it was because tall timber lay in that
direction.

There is a bee tree within ten miles of St. Louis, on the farm of a widow lady who protects the tree from the woodman's axe and the bees from all interference.  When the bees got ready to swarm they go
where they like with her approval, and no one says them nay. For twenty years, we are told, they have thus enjoyed their bee rights.

While bees seem inclined to move West they love an early peep at the rising sun and always select a tree as the place of their abode which has an eastern entrance.  They are early risers. We make a practice of going to the apiary as the first step of the morning's work. In mid-summer when honey abounds, we generally find some bees going out and frequently some coming home with stores, before the sun rises. A man may know a great deal about bees, but he will still have a great deal to learn about them. With all their system they are a mystery. They gather honey all day and in busy season build comb at night. When do the little fellows rest?  That they weary from labor, is certain. We have seen them drop exhausted, in front of the hive, and not until a moment's breathing spell was taken, could they rise again to enter the hive with their heavy loads. Why should they work so hard for food for others to enjoy? Few, if any of these hatched out in spring and early summer live to see the snow of winter.

*Greeley - A city of north-central Colorado  north-northeast of Denver. It was founded in 1870 as a cooperative farm and temperance center and named for its patron, Horace Greeley.  Horace Greeley was a newspaper man and saw the West for real and wrote what he truly saw.   Horace Greeley was very conscience and concerned about the people, the land, and the water.

thanks to Historical Honeybee

Mobile Bee Observatory

I went over to Berkeley this afternoon to have a look at a show at the Berkeley Art Museum and stumbled upon an event celebrating the 40th birthday of Chez Panisse.  OPENed  Amongst all the urban farmers, youth food education tables, artists, performers and musicians I found a display of beautifully painted bee hives and an enormous observation hive.  I wandered over, dragging my unwilling companion closer to the bees flying in and out.  I observed the IV drip bag of sugar water to the side and watched as the mastermind of this display, Rob Keller of the Napa Valley Bee Company,  squeezed the sweet liquid directly into the hive.  In an instant the bees lined up and began feeding on the sugar water.

I struck up a conversation with the wild eyed enthusiast and we discussed the terrible dearth of food for the bees this year.  He told the crowd they better stock up on local honey now because there wasn't going to be much of it.  We pretty much cleared the area with our detailed bee crazy conversation and I could feel my friend fading a bit in interest.  I quickly made arrangements to have a look at Rob's operation up in Napa and then headed back to San Francisco. 

Dog Days

Our bees have not had a good season. The cold rainy winter lasted until the end of June and even a little into July.  While it stopped raining, we did not see the sun until August.  The bees were not flying, the flowers were not blooming, it was cold, windy and miserable.   We found foulbrood, usually a winter disease, in one of the hives in June so we had to treat it with antibiotics and lose access to all the honey they produced.  The swarm we caught near the school slowly dwindled away to nothing despite the fact they had a laying queen.  The smaller secondary swarm from our main colony did not have a good queen or something tragic happened to her and we watched that colony develop a laying worker and become a colony of all drones.

We have a had a month of good weather so we thought for sure we would be harvesting some honey today.   We had a look in the first hive, the swarm we caught at the school.  The bees clustered on one frame and were just about the size of a tennis ball.  No queen.  This hive will be dead in a week.

The second hive had a good pattern of brood and I could not see or smell any signs of foulbrood.  But there was only enough honey for the hive, not enough for us to take any.  I was grateful they were doing well and did not care if we got honey from them or not.

The third hive was the small swarm from out main hive.  Cluster of bees about the size of a tennis ball, like the first, no queen.  Doomed.

The fourth hive was doing great.   Three boxes full of healthy activity, though they were using only 2/3 of the boxes and gathering mainly on the east side, leaving two or three frames empty on the west side, probably because of the way the sun hit the hive.  We took the top box off and looked into the second box.  That's when I smelled it.  Foulbrood.  Damn it.  We tried to figure out how to deal with it without throwing away more equipment.  No way around it.  We had to make a new box for them, dump them in, treat them with antibiotics and throw away all their hard work.

After that disappointment I was excited to see if the fifth colony, the big one where the queen got stuck in the honey supers, had recovered.   We had seen larvae in the lower boxes before I left town for a few weeks but we were uncertain if it was going to be new worker bees from the recently freed queen or drones from the laying worker.  I had noticed a few days ago that very few bees were flying in and out of the hive.  As we opened it up it became clear why.  The colony was completely gone.  The only bees in the boxes were robber bees from other colonies.  There were two frames of spotty dead capped worker brood (not drone, so yay!) and some had even tried to chew their way out before they died.  But whjere the heck did the queen and all the workers go?  It seems like they absconded rather than died out or swarmed, though I suppose there could have been zero nurse bees to keep the eggs and larvae fed and warm.  Or they died before the new ones could hatch.  Not sure.  Not experienced enough to know exactly what happened.  All I know is they are gone and we have no honey. 

Not the very best news.  But at least we have two colonies that are doing OK.  Not great, but OK.  
This was one of the most disheartening days  I've had as a beekeeper.  I am afraid that the foulbrood spores have contaminated the entire area in the garden where we have the beehives and are probably also in all of our spare boxes and frames.  Probably a thousand dollars' worth of hive boxes and frames possibly useless.  Not possibly.  Probably. 

Peter and I discussed the possibility of buying a new colony and putting it on the roof in all new equipment to see if it did better up there in the full sun.  I have always thought it was too shady and cold back there where they are now.    I have been wanting to try a hive on the roof but am sad that we have to do it because our other hives are failing.

larvae spotted in Big Hive

Well, the good news is that we found larvae in the brood boxes of the Big Hive today.  We are not sure if it is new larvae from the recently freed queen (the one trapped in the honey supers for who knows how long) or if it is drone larvae from the laying worker we kicked out.  Once it is capped we will be able to tell since the drone larvae sticks out a lot more than the flat sandy colored capped worker brood. 

Queen Trapped!

Today we went out to harvest the frames of honey off the Big Hive.  When we opened up the top box and removed the inner cover at first we did not quite understand what we were looking at.  The capped and partially capped frames of honey we put in there two weeks ago from the other hives were chewed open and empty.  It looked like instead of finishing off the honey and capping it, they had instead decided to eat it all.  But why?

I wanted to see what was happening in the brood boxes, even thought this colony is usually pretty aggressive,  so we popped the three very light supers off and set them aside while we looked into the brood boxes.  All we could see were capped drone cells and no worker cells at all.  The population had really dropped dramatically since the last time we were in here.  This hive was in big trouble.  It seemed like it had somehow lost the queen and it looked like there were mainly drones populating the boxes.  Signs of a laying worker.   But what happened!!!!!  There was a very good queen in there just a month before.  We looked for succession or swarm cells and found none.  The only thing to do was to get rid of the laying worker, put in a frame of eggs from another hive (if we could find one we could spare), and hope that they could raise a new queen for themselves.  

Getting rid of a laying worker is a very time consuming and disruptive process.  You can't tell which worker it is so you have to take the whole hive far away and dump all the bees out onto the ground.  The theory being that the laying worker has never left the hive in her life and will not be able find her way back to fly back in.  The field workers and drones will.  Problem solved.  And it makes the birds really happy because all of a sudden there is a huge pile of confused bees wandering around on the ground just waiting to be eaten.  

We got ready to dump the workers out to get rid of the laying worker.  That's when Charlie spotted a black queen running around in one of the honey supers we had just taken off a few minutes before.  Somehow she got trapped up there.  Probably our fault.  The poor thing had no room to lay eggs because the supers were full of capped or partially finished honey and no attendants to clean out the cells for her.  The colony probably could still smell she was in the hive so did not think to make a queen cell until it was too late.  And then a worker started laying and they just make drones...who in turn are hungry little guys.  The drones ate all the honey we had been counting on harvesting today.  

This is all an educated guess.  Not sure what actually happened, but who cares, we have a queen!  Relieved, we set her aside in a closed box so she did not fly away and then reassembled the brood boxes  after dumping all the workers and drones out across the yard.  

 A big set back but maybe this colony will bounce back.  

Beekeeping seemed easier when we first started.  The more I learn the harder it gets.

 

Bees Avoid a Big Boulder

The Daily Press,
May 14, 1910, Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Bees Avoid A Big Boulder
Move Out of Tree Before Huge Stone Crashes Into it Smashing Everything in Path.

New York.—Someone tipped off to a big hive of bees in a hollow tree at the foot of Hog mountain that a ten ton boulder was going to roll down from the top of the mountain and smash everything in its path,  including the tree in which they had stored 700 pounds of honey. In what way they got the tip is not known.

The best evidence the bees had it is they moved to another tree out of the danger line a few hours before the big boulder made its sensational downward rush, and that Reuben Van Winkle, who owns the farm on which the bee trees are, returned from Montclair loaded down with presents he bought after he had sold the 700 pounds of honey for fancy prices.  Incidentally, when in Montclair, he fell
so rich as a result of the bee tip and the boulder he went to the Central hotel and had a full course dinner.

The bees occupied the hollow tree ten years. Van Winkle never disturbed them, because he knew the
only way to get the honey was to cut the tree down. He was averse to doing that. So the insects worked
away until the tree literally was saturated with honey. Two weeks ago he noticed the bees were moving to another hollow tree. He thought it was because a new swarm was being driven out of the old quarters to find a new home. As he sized it up, nothing short of a big fight in the hive could force bees to go out in December.

Friday night the Van Winkles were aroused by a terrific crashing on the mountainside. Van Winkle got out of bed and went to investigate. By that time the noise had ceased and he could not discover the cause. In the morning, however, he saw the big boulder in his meadow and up the mountainside trees which had been felled by its rush. At the end of the line lay the old bee tree.

Then it dawned upon Van Winkle why the bees had moved.

thanks to Historical Honeybee

John's swarm

Just helped hive a swarm in Potrero. 1 million gay people from all over the world can't get me to walk one block from my apartment to join the party. But a swarm of bees will get me off the couch and into the bee suit in ten seconds flat.

My friend John called to ask what to do, his bees swarmed into the neighbor's apple tree.  I raced right over with a box and my suit.  The swarm was easy, it was on a low branch and John already had a ladder set up beneath it.  Ill I had to do was shake it into the cardboard box and dump them into their new home. 

He has access to a very cool piece of property behind his house that actually belongs to CalTran.  There is a buffer on either side of the freeway made up of weed trees and giant blackberry patches.  He cleared his out and put in a bunch of raised beds for vegetables and planted fruit trees.  Last year he tried beekeeping but his hive died.  This year his hive swarmed and now he has two!

red and black queen

We figured if the sun stays out long enough today we will be pulling honey frames out of the beehives and harvesting it all weekend.  We figured wrong.

No Honey. Bees are on strike. Each hive has its own issues and demands. None include giving us any extra honey. But we did find a red queen who is making blond and redheaded bees. And then a black queen who is laying dark black and gray bees. Wish I had the camera with me.

The Small Swarm and the School Yard Bees are not really thriving.  We could not find a queen  but it seemed like there was larvae.  The populations seem to be dwindling.  I did not smell or see foulbrood.  Maybe the old queens are just not laying well and they will make a new queen.  

The Split is doing OK after we treated them with antibiotics, but we would have liked to add a few frames of brood and nurse bees to boost the population to get them going.  Unfortunately, none of the other colonies had anything to spare.  We also realized that we should have pulled the capped honey frames out of the Split before we gave them antibiotics because now we cannot use it for human consumption.  

Our Big Hive looked like it was doing great so we did not open up the brood boxes.  They tend to be aggressive so we figured no need to bother them if they were doing OK.  Their honey supers were close to being finished but not quite ready.  We moved some of the capped and partially capped frames of honey from the smaller weaker hives into the Big Hive's supers so the Big Hive could finish them up quickly and we could harvest them maybe next week.  

Here's to the first (and late) harvest of 2011.

Wyoming Bees

I have been taking a painting class and decided to do something with the photos I took on a month long road trip across the country.  This is a painting from a photo of commercial beehives in Wyoming. 

eggs! up close and personal!

May Inspection

We took advantage of a nice sunny day to have a look at the new colonies and do a hive inspection in the apiary.  The Small Swarm and the School Yard Bees seem to be doing well.  Lot's of activity.

The Big Hive that we split a few months ago looks like it either is making a new queen for itself or is getting ready to swarm or both.  (Or already did....possible origin of Small Swarm.)  We found this perfect queen cell in the middle of the frame with some bees tending to it.  Or tearing it down.  It is so hard sometimes to tell what phase the bees are in.  We tried to look inside but could not see if there was a queen larvae in there or not. 

On the bottom of the frames we also found many many swarm cells.  Again, it was hard to tell if they were being built or had already hatched.

The Split we made from the Big Hive somehow has foulbrood.  It was doing so well I am not sure how this happened.  We put them in new and clean boxes with brand new frames.  I suppose some could have come over with the frames we split of from the Big Hive but it does not have foulbrood.  So question mark, question mark.   This disease is very irritating.  I am not sure how to fully eradicate it from our apiary. 

I have the antibiotics so we gave the Split its first dose today and will do the second one as recommended. 

Lots of pollen of all different colors and textures.  Four of the hives are doing well.  Hopefully the Split will bounce back.   Now that the weather has cleared up a bit they will be flying and building up their field forces for collecting nectar and pollen.

sealing off the entrance

The swarm we caught on 30th and Church, The School Yard Swarm, is building this waxy barrier at the entrance to their hive. It is sunny and hot so I am not sure what they are up to. But they know best, so we'll leave them alone for now.

Afterswarm

I went out to water the garden and noticed a swarm settling into a tree on our property line.  My neighbor had told me he saw a swarm yesterday that flew right over his head and down the public staircase at the end of my block.  "And then they took a hard right!" he said.   They may have come from our Big Hive and this might be a little afterswarm. 

The swarm located itself in a very hard to reach spot in this tree.  We had to work really hard to get a ladder up there but finally we figured out a safe way to catch them and bring them down into the box we had set out for them. 

A few of the bees fell into this Philadelphus shrub when we shook them out of the tree.  By dark they had all flown into the hive to be with their queen.  At least we THINK there is a queen.  We'll see in a few days if there are any eggs. 

A Bee C's

When I got back from my trip to Florida Charley called to let me know that he had seen a swarm at Church and 30th fly up into a tree as he was walking home from work. Could we get over there right now? Peter and I threw some tools and an empty box in my truck and met Charley at the corner.  There they were, up in a pretty tall ficus tree, a nice big swarm.

Charley climbed up with a rope and some loppers.  He swung the rope over a higher branch and then tied it to the branch the bees were clustered on while Peter and I set up the box and ladder below.  He cut the branch and slowly lowered the branch, swarm and all, down to me on the ladder.  Then I placed the branch on the waiting box and we watched the bees flood into the frames. 

There was some question about whether we got the queen or not because a number of the bees flew right back up into the tree and settled back into a cluster.  Others that had been knocked off the branch on the way down filed in an orderly fashion right into the front entrance to their new home. 

Everything was going well and we thought we had about another 15 minutes to wrap things up.  That's when the school buses pulled up.  It was 3pm and school was out.  All I could think was that some poor kid was going to get stung by accident and we would all get in trouble for collecting the swarm and causing a hazard. 

There were a few nervous moments with the bus drivers but the kids got loaded on with no problems and off they went.  The bees, however, were not so cooperative.  There was still a bunch of them up in the tree so Charley climbed back in and shook them out.  They landed all over the sidewalk and on the back of my truck. 

The bus kept going by every few minutes with the windows down and gaping wide-eyed passengers staring at our project.  Finally, we got most of the bees in the box and loaded them into my truck and carried them home to our apiary.  It is a nice sized swarm and we are excited for a new addition.