Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Supering

As I discovered while moving the Josephium, its super is already full of honey. I have added a second super below the first one.

During all the excitement, I seem to have picked up an insect sting, with no stinger left in my flesh. It was near my knee, though my pants, not particularly painful, but very, very itchy.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Move again

The Benedictium seems to have recovered from its move. Foragers are bringing in pollen.

The Josephium is going great guns even after its swarm. I have decide to move it gradually, a few feet a day. Even so the bees have a hard time finding it when returning from foraging.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

The move

So after putting a a new hive under the mulberry tree, and thinking about moving back to the bee yard up by the orchard, we decided that we liked the location under the mulberry better, as it had a better mix of sun and shade, and that we would move the Benedictium and the Josephium down the hill to be closer to the Ambrosium, rather than move the Ambrosium up the hill to be near the other two.

So yesterday I clamped the Benedictium together with ratchet straps and determined that the whole thing was still light enough to budge by hand. Last night after the sun went down, I budged the thing off of its rails and onto a hand cart, and moved it down to just uphill of the Ambrosium, onto the same set of rails which the Ambrosium sits on. Brenda helped greatly by holding a flashlight and guiding me through the dark. It all seemed to go seamlessly.

Today, we saw a bunch of bees circling around aimlessly at the Benedictium's old site. So apparently things did not go so well as I had thought.

To make things even worse, there was a frenzy in front of all three of our hives today. Was this robbing? I reduced the entrances to all three hives.

Let's pray for the best.

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Swarm!

Again. This time it was our new hive, the Josephium.

Again, it was the apiariella who spotted them, and just like last year it was at lunch. A veritable "tornado of bees!" Brenda caught them on video, so I could see them. (Again, just like last year, I was at work.)

They swarmed into the northernmost pine near our house, waaay up there. There was no catching this swarm, and we had no where to put them if we did.

Avete et valete!