STOP! THIEF! I'm Bee-ing Robbed!

...or not.  Heard a great frenzy of in-flight bees surrounding the hives.  Thirty minutes later it was calm inside and outside the hives.  But, still, there were these large galutes coming and going, and not a one of them was seen to be bringing home pollen for the good of the colony.  Just don't know, are these drones?  Robbers?  Just big, lazy ladies?

LEE'z BEE'z GET A FRONT DOOR SECURITY WEBCAM

The first part of this movie is playing at 1/2 speed.  Most of it is running at 1/3 speed.  Sure makes it easier to observe bee behaviors. 

Notice the arriving cargo bees with pollen packed on their legs.  Also, do you agree there is a non-random number of instances where an arriving bee head-butts a departing bee?  Notice starting at 21 seconds, a bee stumbles out of the house on to the front deck, rubs her face with her front feet as if to wake up, then takes off for the day.  In the last second, see on the right where an arriving bee and a bee just taken off collide.  This is a very busy airport.

TALE OF TWO HIVES

Two new duplicate bee colonies, from the same source, were installed on the same day in early June, in identical hives only two feet apart.  One colony is building parallel planes of wax comb and filling it with well behaved little girls, surrounded by orderly and consistent honey.

But the other colony right next door is running amok, building curve-shaped comb in total disregard for the carefully constructed prepared frames inside their hive box.  This unruly, doing-it-my-way colony is building new babies, new comb and new honey faster than the fastidious, engineers next door.  

See?  This is what happens to a community when an engineer is not in charge of order, discipline, planning and design.


Speaking of engineers...notice on the photo at left how the bees are hanging in a chain.  And notice there is no guide telling them how to build comb straight down.  That chain of bees is believed by some, to be like a gravity-driven plumb-bob.  It tells the other bees what direction is down.  That's how the bees get panels of comb to be parallel to each other.   

Next class, we'll go over the hexagon (the shape of every single one of the cells) and why the mathematics of structural engineering confirms that the strongest/simplest structure is a triangle, and a hexagon is just six triangles formed to simulate a circle.  The beehive comb-cell, it turns out, is the mathematically optimized maximum structural strength from the minimum of construction materials.  (Hey, if you had to make 13,000 flights to flowers a mile away just to build one 1/4" comb-cell, you'd be focused on structural economization, too.)

THIS DOESN'T TAKE A REAL ESTATE GENIOUS

From our back yard in Piedmont, SD.  


If you ever see something better than this...buy it.  
At any price.

ANIMALS SEEM TO BE GETTING ALONG

Or crowded ...

ONE BIG BEE

One of our family.  Click on this lady!

INSTALLING TWO NEW COLONIES IN TOP BAR HIVES

 I designed and built two modified top bar hives.  Meanwhile, two colonies arrived via the mail.  

Too bad some things went awry.  First, when the bee supplier called to say they were behind on shipping, I said "fine," not knowing they already had the bees packed, but they just sat there in the Georgia warehouse.  When the bees arrived, their was no more food, the bees were badly stressed, and I am not sure one of the queens survived.  

Then, despite request the post office call me when the bees came in, I arrived home to discover the bees had been waiting all day without food.

So we rushed the hives out to the yard and installed the bees.  Same as last year's installation of a new colony...first move the queen's chamber to the new hive, then shake the livin daylights out of the bees in the inverted shipping box.  Oddly, I still did not get stung this year even though I shook and banged on their shipping box.

Let's hope these ladies thrive in their new forest home.

Lee's Bee's at www.Leez.Bz