Chop Wood Carry Water Plant Seeds is a blog about Self-Sufficient Homesteading. How can we live by creating a sustainable bio-diverse world, instead of by consuming and destroying the only one we have? What kind of teaching have you got if you exclude nature?

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Top Bar Hive Report

Im back from holidays and was happy to see both of the TBH Bees flying in and out. I see new combs being built and a few capped honey combs too.
Im still not sure if the hive which swarmed this year has a fertile Queen or not. What i do know is that they seem very calm and there is clearly activity in the hive. My intuition sais all is just right but my ego sais to open the hive and check if the Queen is in there. I will follow the Intuition and keep the hive closed for the Bees sake. I will look for Orientation Flights, Pollen Intake and Drone numbers as a sign for Queen presence. I can see bees removing cell caps every so often. Drone cells or worker cells its a question? Since the Queen has mated last Wednesday (by my account) its impossible to have working bees emerging just yet. So maybe its the colony's worst nightmare; A Horror Laying Worker Bee !!! I hope not. In this video one can see how calm they are.


The second hive which houses the captured swarm seems rather aggressive when I openned it to take out the empty honey jar which was standing in the way of comb building.
As soon as I removed the top bars from the back they started zooming around my head so i sprayed them with water and they retreated. This colony seems to be doing well.

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