May 4 at the Hives

On Wednesday, Earl, Sam, and I tended the hives.  We started the day by checking on our neighbor's hive that Earl built.  If I were a bee I'd want to live here :-)

Then we went over to the apiary (fancy word for a bee yard).  Here I am striking a red hot pose in the bee veil.

 You might have noticed that I am always wearing a white shirt (the same white shirt to be honest) every time.  That's because the bees don't bother you as much if you are in a light color.  If you're wearing black, they register you as a threat to the hive (think bears) and are more likely to come after you.   Pika, the dog gets stung all the time, which is why she's chilling in the wagon (also the ticks can't get her there).




Here's Sam (in the pink) and Earl (in the white) smoking their hands.  It helps keep the bees from stinging you there since the hands are often exposed.

Because the hives have started to establish themselves, we removed the feed jars as well as the top box.  So you can see that at the beginning the hives were two boxes high (look behind me in the above photo), but now they're only one.

Because they had so much space to expand when the second box was present, most of the hives built combs outside of the frames.  There were some really beautiful configurations.  Here're some pictures of the coolest ones.  You can also see the feeder jars which we removed.

But we had to remove the wild comb so that we could put the lids on the boxes.

When we replaced the lids we left them open a little to vent.

These shorter frames are the honey supers.  They sit on top of the brood chamber (the big box on the bottom).  You can see where the honey is in this frame!

 

The wire that you see between the frames is the queen excluder.  That gets placed between the brood chamber and the honey supers so that the queen can't get up to there to lay eggs.  All the eggs and larvae remain in the brood box and the honey gets put into the supers.  This means that there aren't larvae in your honey :-0
 

 

Last, this little thing is called a queen cage.  It's how the queen is delivered to the bee keeper.  It gets put into the hive, and the bees chew through a sugar plug to get her out and integrated into the  hive.

Turns out my iphone has a timer!  Who knew?  Here we all are together!  In the background you can see all the boxes with only one box now except for one hive which has 2 honey supers on the top.