Intro to the Smoker

On Saturday I helped Earl to check the status of the hives.  Well, I helped with 3 hives, and then he had to take me back (luckily I don't live far away) so that I could take X to his friend's birthday party in San Francisco.

Before opening the lids, he smoked the bees with this thing that looks like an old-fashioned coffee pot with bellows stuck to the back.

Here he is putting some tinder and burnables in the can.

It's ready to smoke!!

We noted the temperment of each hive: calm, nervous, or aggressive and the population low, moderate, heavy, very heavy.  It seems like those two things are related to each other--the denser the population the more agitated the bees, and when the hive gets too crowded, they will swarm and migrate.  This is why you see hives that are stacked several boxes high--you add a box to make more room so that they won't fly off to make a hive somewhere else.


Here's a moderately populated hive.  The wood slats that you see are the frames on which the honeycombs are "drawn".  See how there are tons of bees on some of the frames, but not others?  If the hive was heavily populated, all the frames would be drawn upon.  Drawn means that the bees have created their own honeycomb on top of the template comb.

We also looked for the queen in each hive.  The queen is kind of like the Highlander--there can bee only one.  She has a longer tail than the other bees, and when she skitters around on the surface of the frame, all the other bees get out of her way.  The workers and the drones only live for about 6 weeks, but a queen can live for 5 years.

The queens are also marked (hopefully) with some paint which makes them easier to find.  Can you imagine trying to find the queen wandering around in a cluster of bees like the one in the picture?  

I also saw the little larvae curled up inside the hexes of the combs!  I wish that I could say that they were cute, but...