your goddamn bees thread made me stay late from work without finishing what little i had to do today!

i hope the ugly hive can get it's shit together before you go nazi on the poor guys.

I thought this too but the very high quality and interesting detail of your recordings made up for the 45 second wait

i bet its cuz you feed them honey

I'd really like an update on this thread if possible? It's up there as one of the best threads on litheye imo

I'll try to do one. I've been on and off ignoring the bees recently. The best news at the moment is that the hive I was going to gas looks like it's going to pull through. They've got their numbers up, rather late though, they have harvested no honey reserves to get them through winter. But I can feed them.

I'm currently trying to get photos of the bees looking like Santa. They're harvesting a very powdery white tree, and I think I have found the tree actually, and it's coating their heads in white pollen, but the photos have all come out terrible, I think this stuff doesn't photo well at all.

They're now so numerous, they have literally manpower to waste and have become inquisitive of all visitors to the point of outright aggression. They're certainly a lot less fun than they were.
Yeah I got stung and for literally no reason at all. Well ok I was pulling a frame out and I was so used to the bees being tame and having to work hard to piss them off, I was in there at the height of the day at most activity, and wearing no protective gear at all. Yeah... at least I'm not allergic.

14 pages of nothing but goodthread.

bees have made you their bitch

I have quite some catching up to do.

So from the 2nd of July, this is how it was.

Show me the honey...


Right, the pretty hive has started storing honey. Good times.
As you see, it's shiney liquid, a bit lighter colour than I was hoping, but ok. In the very top left few cells you can see they have started capping it.

Capping is where the bees cover the honey with a wax cap on the top of the cell to protect and store it. They cap it not when it's full, but when it's dried out. Honey with a moisture content greater than 18.6% is not considered to be honey, because with such moisture it is doomed to failure with fungus or bacteria or whatever, it has to dry out to become immune to those sorts of problems. The bees don't know much about percentages of course, they just know dry when they feel it.

Bees aren't perfect, they like to think they are, and they like everybody thinking they are, but here they screw up a little bit.


The yellow circled bits are pollen being stored, yeah I only this month found out that bees store pollen like they store honey. Why I didn't think they would, I don't know, but they do. Pollen is used to feed the young, it's their only source of protein. Which is why they should not be storing it up here with the honey, there are no young up here and never will be because the queen can't get up here. They'll figure it out though. The blue circled bits is pollen on the other side of the frame, you can see right through this stuff, although preformed base foundation was used here, it is based on exactly how bees make comb from scratch. The centre of a cell on one side of the frame is where 3 cell walls on the other side of the frame intersect. This is for maximum structure strength for when all you know how to make is hexagons.

The good news


I call these occupancy shots. Taking a photo from above it's easy to count how many frame-sides are being occupied in a hive. The left frame in this hive is cut off, because there really is nobody there, anyway of these 9 visible frames, 18 frame-sides, I marked them red and green for occupancy and easy counting.
12 frame sides out of 20 total are now being occupied. This is the hive that I was going to kill off because they were only 3 weeks earlier, still struggling on just 5 frame sides.
Since they have now decided to live on, I'm going to help them with that. They're too late in the season to make any honey, I'll give them another month unassisted to see how that goes. After that, I'll feed them manually to perhaps strengthen them going into autumn, perhaps that will be month before I should be feeding them, but hopefully they get one last batch of new bees born who had a better start in life and may cope with winter better.

So back on the 10th we got a photo of capped honey.


With the bees being newly aggressive we didn't dare go for a proper look. This new aggression is strange, the only direct aggression I've heard about 1st hand was all over honey. They went in, stole all their honey, tried to leave with it and came under ferocious assault. Now up to this point we've been going in and threatening their brood chamber, their young, and this has barely lead to a response. But now honey is present, they're defintely being a lot more inquisitive and basically in your face, literally.

It seems odd they will get all brave to protect food instead of their young, but if I think about it, their young are born some 2000 every single day, but their winter honey is the effort of hundreds of thousands of bees over months of time. So it makes sense if you choose to remove the mammalian automated response to protect the young.

Right, I've been trying to get a photo of the bees looking old. They've started harvesting this very powdery white pollen and it's turning them white. Sadly the photos of this have been really bad, it's almost as though the camera is literally incapable of picking up the pollen. So I have some photos, but they don't do it justice.

The one right in the middle here, you can see her legs have got white pollen sacks and she looks a bit cloudy.


Another with quite the blue rinse...


It seems to really pronounce on the back of the head I think they have extra hair up there and it gets a proper dose.


Two cloudy ones coming in to land.


You may notice I recently took the entire door arrangement off the front of the hive there and it left a pattern of debris behind. Both hives had their doors removed because I notice other types of hives don't have any sort of entrance doorway restrictions whereas my types always have.
So I removed them. It's always crowdy as hell outside the hive and I don't see why they shouldn't get a lot more access.

It's such a shame that the camera refuses to pick up just how grey the bees are now they're covered in this stuff.

glad to hear the loser hive stopped being so bad at this game.

where do all the dead bees go? i imagine they leave the hive or if they die in the hive the other bees move them out?