I spent a couple of hours with the bees today. I have needed to open the hives for a few weeks, but the heat makes the wax comb all droopy and you have to be careful about manipulating the hives. I don’t want to kill a queen or disturb any of the carefully constructed bee-works inside the hives.<\/p>\n
Today it dropped down into the middle 80s and the humidity was low so I suited up and went to work. I have my eye on a nylon ventilated suite. The one I have is horribly hot. I have to wait until I am working again before I spend any money on bees.<\/p>\n
I have been peeking in under the lid at the honey supers and they seemed to be filling up, but when I opened up the hives there was not as much honey as I had hoped. There was lots of pollen, indicating that the bees were finding flowers, but little nectar. I took any frames that had more than about 2\/3 honey and left the other partially filled frames for the bees.<\/p>\n
In all I got 8 mostly filled frames out of the three hives, which is a good haul and much more than I got the last time.<\/p>\n
I split one hive. The smoker was working and the bees were not particularly upset with me, so I took the time. My method of using wet towels to cover the parts of the hive where I am not working seems to keep the bees calm. They don’t like being open so I only leave the space of a frame or two open where I am pulling them out.<\/p>\n
I found brood, although I did not find any day old brood. I am guessing that they bees were covering the very young ones. I did not see the queen. I pulled off the top deep and put it on a base just to the right of it, and swapped some brood frames from the bottom box to the former top box. Then I put a new deep on top of each so they would have plenty of room.<\/p>\n
With luck one box will have the queen and one box will have a frame of new brood so that the bees can make a queen in the queenless box. This is called a “Walk Away Split” and is the traditional way to increase you bees. It works about half the time.<\/p>\n
No stings this time. The smoke kept the bees calm and I used nitrile painting gloves underneath the regular bee gloves. I almost always get a sting through the gloves, so this time I tried the trick of using a thin plastic glove underneath the regular gloves. It seemed to work. The gloves had several bee stingers on them after I finished, but none made it to my hands.<\/p>\n
I will spin the frames tonight and filter the honey. Erica will bottle the honey when she finds time. Perhaps Sunday I will put out the honey sign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spent a couple of hours with the bees today. I have needed to open the hives for a few weeks, but the heat makes the wax comb all droopy and you have to be careful about manipulating the hives. I don’t want to kill a queen or disturb any of the carefully constructed bee-works […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}