kinda disappointing, would have hoped they make their bees fight each other pokemen style to settle their differences

If it means Bunk stops posting about his bee's, don't do it.

A few things I wanna mention this week so I'll do more posts but shorter or I'm confusing myself let alone anybody trying to follow this.



This is a frame from the WBC hive (The pretty one with sloped sides).

What's interesting is the inside of the black ringed areas, the cells underneath the bees that you can almost see contain uncapped larvae. I've actually looked up the breeding cycle a bit.
A regular worker bee takes 21 days (18-22 range) from birth to emergence.

3 days as a egg.
6 days as uncapped larvae
The final 12 days they are capped as they go through pupa to emerging bee.

I haven't actually seen the queen in the WBC hive. But I know she's there because I've had these hives for nearly 3 weeks and I see uncapped larva, that can only have come from my queen laying eggs here, so she's without any doubt in there and definitely been a brazen hussy and not a virgin.



This picture kinda shows why I haven't seen the queen, sort of, kinda. Counting from the left, the gap between frames 3 and 4 is huge, remember how I screwed up badly my frame spacing, well that's never come good yet. The gap as you see it is after Friday's "squeezing" where I shunted them together to force the bees to unbuild all the bulbous comb they tried to fill the gap with, I don't even know if they will rectify what they already did, but I presume they will if I restrict their space. I'm such an asshole to them sometimes. Fledge reckons I should leave them be, but you know what, what's the point in being God if you can't bring a little misery into people's lives for absolutely no reason at all?

Anyway, the point about the queen not beeing seen, I can't easily pull frames out of the WBC as it is, because the real bad spacing is causing stress on the bees as they get rolled and bashed as I clumsily try to not waggle the frames around in large open spaces. This causes them to start flying and get generally more interested in me. This isn't great for me.
So I know she's in there, I know she's laying, that's good enough for now until I fix this frame spacing.

Right, here's a photo from last week, you might remember it from famous posts like "My bees have mites". (I'll come back to the mites later)



And here is that same frame/side this week



I've decided not to scribble on these pictures because I'd just be mapping out for you things that I spotted, the scribbles would stop you finding things I missed.

I'll just have to describe differences I've noticed and think are interesting and perhaps I'll even be able to describe where such things are.

I noticed that a queen cup near the top left has been partially disassembled.
There's a slightly elevated cell in the bottom right that this week is hatching. I think this might be a male drone, they get raised up cell tops as they're a bit bigger than regular worker bees.
About an inch above and to the left of that drone hatching is an "^" shaped arrangement of capped cells. In the last week photo the final of the cells making that constellation is uncapped. There are many many places on these comparison pictures where you can follow lines from fixed points (like the wires at the bottom of the picture) and see where uncapped have been capped and capped have hatched.

This frame is from the National hive. (No sloped sides ugly ass box) I'll be trying to each week take a photo of this frame and side just to see a comparison or development of it. No reason for this frame in particular except that for now it's been easy to find and identify from it's unusual arrangement of queen cups. I'll mark it with a marker next week so it's even easier to find.

Also, this week, the bees aren't really interested in this frame, they are elsewhere in the hive. I don't even know what that means apart from "My work here is done".

In the National hive I got the frame spacing way better than the WBC and so I can pull each frame out without pissing off the bees much at all.
This is also the hive we have a mites problem in.
We pulled out every single frame and visually inspected for mites and photographed every frame as it's a lot easier to spot when they're not all running around I guess. Anyway we could not find any mites while we were in there. Considering how hard they are to spot when they are dead on the varroa inspection board I wasn't suprised to not find them. But although we intended to sugar coat the bees to help control mites, we at least expected to spot at least one mite even if only very briefly.

Well we didn't see any and we decided to not sprinkle sugar on them as a response to that and we'd take another diagnosis from the frame photos.

Here's one of them.


Can't see any mites, but we got the queen again. There's no spoiler here, if you can't pick it out on this picture there's little hope for you. It's huge and has no really dark stripes. Most people mark there queens with a regulation approved colour, this is to make finding her easier (but lol ffs she's huge and not even difficult to spot I don't know why people say she is.) but also if you do mark her at birth anybody can tell her age from the mark as the colour changes every year on regulation. Ok, not as secure as the odometer on a car, but wtf, it's a queen, you don't like it just replace it.

So anyway I'm not gonna bother posting all the photos we took for diagnosing varroa as they are mostly frames of bees, but we studied them for about 5 minutes each and could not find a single mite on any picture.
So now we are baffled, we went back to our old pictures and they're not camera aberations or jpg artifacts, they're defintely varroa. And there was defintely varroa on the inspection board.

We can't really think of any reason for this disappearance of the mites. They breed on a 10 day cycle, and it's just possible that last week I'd had the hives for 10 days.
Remembering that the queens were trapped, it's possible that the frames I got had very little larva in them, and since the queens remained trapped for at least 4 days, the mites would have had to suffer the same procreation stress the bees were.
This could have created a sink in their numbers, because the mites breed by placing their eggs into the uncapped larvae, no uncapped larvae, no mites. It's a guess, I don't know.

Also we noticed the population of the National hive is really low. They life on just 2 of the 5 frames they came on. Low numbers of bees, low numbers of mites. That queen has got a real job on to repopulate that hive. Almost worried about it too.

Couldn't see any mites in the WBC hive either, but again didn't look much, they get more annoyed that the national hive bees. I've put the varroa inspection board back in the National hive, will count the mites next weekend.

And today, RAPTURE.

For Jesus Christ returning to the earth to save some and kill the rest, the bees today decided to put on a show. I looked out around 1pm and both hives looked like bee fountains. I took a photo of it, but I think I would need a 7 gigapixel camera to pick out a bee fountain at 15 yards range. So I went up and took a whole bunch of pictures of the hive entrances. This is the most activity I've seen in the hives so far and roughly 4 times as busy as I've ever seen it.

We ran some maths on when the queens were released and thus how soon before we can expect to see a huge rise in bees numbers, we reckon it'll be some time after next weekend. Then we're expecting these pictures to look like a calm hive where nothing really happens. I may try to snag some video when this happens again because photos don't really cut it and also they are silent whereas the bees most defintely are not.

I've not cut these pictures down because it kinda of cheapens them. Although photographer I am not. From a photography point of view they likely suck. Although it looks like Imgur did something to them, not sure what... anyway, links instead of inlines because this big breaks things.

http://i.imgur.com/4wWDY.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Cx7kf.jpg

The queen is


nice posts, ty - though I kinda like the drawing on the pics (especially the third one, or lack thereof)

no sign of bunk in a few days... i guess the bees finally got him.