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. 

Linda and Bruce's Bees

Linda has a house in a sweet little neighborhood called Smoky Hollow. This year she and Bruce decided to start keeping bees. They put a screen around the hives to keep a low profile in the neighborhood.

Henry's Bees

My buddy, Henry, decided to keep bees this year. He took to it like a fish to water. He has a hive at his mom's and another at his dad's house. When I went to visit I packed my beejacket and veil so I could have a look at his hives.

Removing bee stings - speed matters, method doesn't

Always good to know....

from: UC Riverside's Entemology page
(expanded from an article published 1996 in The Lancet 348:301-302)

Summary

Background Conventional advice on immediate treatment of honey bee stings has emphasized that the sting should be scraped off, never pinched. The morphology of the sting suggested no basis for this, and such advice is likely to slow down removal of the sting.
Methods The response to honey bee stings was assayed with a measurement of the size of the resulting sting weal. Injection of known quantities of venom demonstrated that this is a good measure of envenomization.
Findings Weal size, and thus envenomization, increased as the time from stinging to removal of the sting increased, even within a few seconds. There was no difference in the response to stings which were scraped or pinched off after two seconds.
Interpretation These data suggest that advice to patients on the immediate treatment of bee stings should emphasize quick removal, without concern regarding the method of removal

Mything Links: bees

While fooling around on the internet I found this nice homemade website full of all sorts of interesting bee related information and images by Kathleen Jenks, Ph.D.  Sometimes sites like this just up and disappear so I decided to print it out for posterity and for my beekeeping library.  As I scrolled through  I figured it was about 15 pages of images and text but once I started printing it I realized my mistake.  After 25 pages my printer ran out of paper.  after 40 pages I ran out of yellow ink (damn you HP.  Even though I am printing in black and white you won't finish this job till I replace the yellow cartridge.)  I thiknk I am only about 3/4 of the way through.  But I think it will be worth it once I get it all printed out.  There are lots of images of bees and beekeeping in art, photos of the oldest bee, bees trapped in amber, stories of bees in folklore and legend.  You know, a bee geeks dream come true. 

MYTH*ING LINKS
An Annotated & Illustrated Collection of Worldwide Links to Mythologies,
Fairy Tales & Folklore, Sacred Arts & Sacred Traditions
by Kathleen Jenks, Ph.D.

COMMON THEMES, EAST & WEST:

IN THE ORLD
and
IN YTHOLOGY:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EES