The Healthy Honeybee

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200 pounds of honey in a house. My guess is, there were probably about 100,000 bees there too. If you have 2 minutes:

Video Link

Yikes.
Thanks to my friend Carolyn who sent me the link.
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When I checked the bees on Sunday, many were carrying these 'pollen packets' on their hind legs. They actually stuff the pollen into the pouches on their hind legs and bring it home to feed the larvae. I saw pale yellow, dark yellow, and some shades of orange. They obviously have a few sources of flowers these days!
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So here you can see the hive I fretted and worried over, thinking it was dead. Busy as can be! I'm so happy to have two good hives. Next trip out will be for cleaning, this one was just to check on them, take off the tar paper and move the straw bales out of their way.
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Bees are such clean insects. They won't relieve themselves inside the hive, not even in winter; they'll wait until it's warm enough to fly out and release their pent-up waste outside. This photo was taken today when I went to check on the bees - the first time all winter - and you can see evidence of their 'cleansing flights' on the snow. You can also see lots of dead bees, which is typical.

I'm a bit worried about one of the hives, though: I think it's dead. I could hear activity in the one hive when I put my ear up to the back of it, but the other was silent. Time will tell. It's still too early to open up the hives and take a real look.
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Here's a fantastic bee video:



Thanks to Insectamonarca's Blog for posting this TED talk first.

Happy New Year!
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This pic was taken 12 days ago - I put some straw bales around the bottom of the hives to provide added protection from the elements. I'm sure it's not absolutely necessary, but it makes me feel better. The tar paper doesn't go down to the bottom of the hives - it kind of reminded me of pants that are too short. Floods, I think they were called by the grownups who used to tease me about my pant legs being too short when I was a kid. "Where's the flood?" Well, nowhere. Is it my fault I was growing so fast? Sheesh.

Anyway, regardless of whether this is a useful endeavour or not, there they are. Like everything else, we'll see what happens.
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The first thing I saw yesterday as I opened my tar papered hives was this furry little friend, who seems to have found a nice dry place to overwinter. He had some lady friends with him too:



I went to fix a mistake - I had forgotten to make a vent hole at the top, so I had to open the hives and replace the inner covers with vented ones that Ken is kindly letting me borrow. All went well at the first hive, very sleepy/cold bees, no movement. The hole-making went beautifully, as you can see below:


That was the easy hive. I saved my biggest meanest hive for last. These ladies seem to be energized by the cold - I opened them up and they were awake and buzzing and didn't really want me there. The hole-making was not as successful:


It was hard to jam my pocketknife through the tar paper without impaling bees - they were really pissy about a new hole in their house.

While I was there I also remembered to fix my entrance reducers so they're not upside down anymore:


So now we're almost ready! I still want to put some straw bales around them for extra windbreak and insulation, but I thought I'd give it a little while.
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