Mid Winter Brawl. Final Round.
So today, I had me two jobs.
1. Get the medicine strips back out.
2. Feed them some Ambrosia.
I don't know even know what 2 is all about. They've either got enough food or they haven't, anyway I bought some, so I figured it's stupid to own it, better if the bees own it.
Madness? THIS IS AMBROSIAAAAAAAAA!!!!
It's basically sugar fondant, kinda like hard modelling plasticene, I think I'm supposed to be able to flatten it to get it into the hive, but it's not really being very co-operative. Also, I was wishing I'd bought two, because I have two hives, derrr.
Anyway, I can't flatten it and I decide to cut the bag in half and put half in each hive, somehow...
As I'm not expecting a fight, I didn't light the smoker, the WBC took it's usual sweet time to get apart, damm thing. And the bees in their went batshit at me. Nothing like the day we moved them here, but was still a good assault, each time I re-approached the hive they launched another wave directly at my face. Decided to light the smoker.
I decided to just get in, grab the medicine and get out and throw the hive back together to limit the attack, they were losing bees really fast it was so cold, or maybe they'd just stung the suit and died. Either way, they were kinda losing this one.
I couldn't get the Ambrosia inside the hive at all, I think I should have warmed it up before leaving the house so it was more maliable, but meh, whatever, I decided to put it outside the hive inside the roof space, which meant removing one of the bee valves. I think the main danger here is that they decide to fill the roof cavity with comb. They'll complain when I rip it out come spring.
The feed bucket in the National wasn't empty. They must be full of feed, this happened on the WBC about 2 months ago and I stopped feeding them, I have been (probably too) worried about the amount of food they have. But I have fed them very late in the season, normally the situation I am in today should be in October, so they really should be overfed if logic serves.
Since this bucket wasn't empty, I didn't really want to move it out, just to put ambrosia there instead, the bucket has liquid sugar, the ambrosia is more solid sugar, it's still sugar, so whatever right?
And having removed the medicine from the National in like about 3 minutes, because it's so simple to work with, I decided to risk re-opening the WBC lid to put the other half of Ambrosia in there.
The little swines went for me as well. I just threw down the other Ambrosia and reached for the camera, realising that I'd not actually got many photos in the chaos earlier.
They don't mess about, they're happy to chow down on some brand new sugar they found while the rest come stinging me. There's a dead one in the lower left of the image. Her heart and arsehole are probably stuck in my bee suit. Arsehole has the stinger, heart pumps the venom in, she leaves it all behind.
Here you can see the size of the tongue they work with. And you know how big the ambrosia brick is roughly, so you tell me, how many licks of those tongues will it take to move 2.5kg of Ambrosia into the hive and how long will that take?
I haven't the first clue. I know that one of those bucketfulls takes less than one week to move. That's a lot of tongueing.
Well that about wraps it up for 2011. I won't be going inside the hives again until spring. I'm hoping to get in before the bulk of the laying starts, I have the problem of my honey supers are now exposed to the queen, she could fill them with larvae. I don't think that's a huge problem, but it will need addressing before I get to the point of wanting to harvest any spring blossom honey. For now I'll check in every 3 weeks or after any nasty storms, just to make sure they're still standing upright, if they get knocked over, they'll be ok for a few days, but it's not a sustainable position for them to be in.
