It’s finally warm enough here, so I could clean all the corpses out of the two hives that survived the winter (one got eaten by a mouse).
There was around 2cm layer of dead bees in there, so the surviving ones had to find an alternate way to go out for a walk. I’m happy to see that there was plenty of food for the winter, though, and they’re already raising the next generation of brood.
For extra dull points, the bees were so dull that I didn’t have to wear a mask or gloves.
The bees in the photo are dead, in case you wonder. I tossed them out and returned the comb to their live relatives.
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The bees weren’t dull if you taught them to beehave.
In this instance, it’s clearly nature over nurture. This is a cultured breed, or was, at any rate (I don’t have evidence that they swapped out the queen).
That’s not dull at all! That’s pretty cool actually.
Now that I think about it, I don’t actually know: Do you poke them out of the honeycomb, or do you just remove big chunks of honeycomb and just put back the wooden frame?
Combs are unpokable (there are cells on either side, with a partition in the middle). I could probably get the dead bees out with tweezers, but didn’t have time to do that. I’ll let bee undertaners take these out. I only scraped off these that were easy to remove, or in a pile under the frames.
With extra insulation over the summer, would you see fewer bee deaths come spring, or is it pretty much guaranteed regardless of any factors?
Edit- Whoops, yes I meant winter lol my bad
I’ll assume you meant winter. It’s my first winter with bees, so I don’t have much any experience. I’m glad these survived, and I resent that mouse that ate my 3rd hive (or whatever it did in there).
I’ve heard that bees will shiver themselves warm enough, if they have food. Therefore, they need to have food, obviously, and lots. I also hear that moisture is more dangerous to bees than cold.
Which reminds me, I really should read a beekeeping book cover-to-cover, instead of just picking up pieces of lore as I go…
I too am curious. Can you describe the process? I find bees fascinating
Which process? Cleaning? My hives are about 2x bigger than necessary, so I have room to shift stuff.
- Light up the smoker. Scare them with lots of smoke. Not sure why this works - there are different hypotheses around.
- Sweep the floor in the spare end of the hive
- Remove ceiling boards. Take out frames, brush off the corpses. Reinsert them into the spare end. Stay calm as they buzz around me like crazy. Move slowly and avoid jostling them. This part requires the most of dull.
- Sweep the other end of the floor, which used to be under the frames
- Poke dead bees out of the entrance
- Move all frames back to their preferred locaticon
Sounds like a nice afternoon to me
Out of curiosity, did you have more hive beetles than normal last year? They were bananas in the Midwest!
I saw one small beetlish thing, not sure if it’s the same one. We must import our bananas, they don’t want to grow here.
