Up to Castlemaine for a break over the weekend, but we got back early enough on Sunday for me to do a bee check. As it turns out, good thing I did, these boxes are filling up!
The bees are busy suckin down the nectar in the front yard...
...while out the back they are filing it away....Katrinas swarm on the left, looking very busy, the queenless swarm on the right.
Sooky looks on
.
.
That's Jazmina belowin full regalia, doing some gardening.
You can't be too carefull...
Inside the queenless hive, they are slowly dying out...loads of Drones.
This drone has seen better days, shabby wings..
The very first frame I took out of "The Other".....chockers. There's gonna be some spinning...
One small supersedure cell in there...
But what's this below, brood in the top box?
Dang, I thought the queen was in the bottom, turns out she's in the top.
I shuffled the boxes around, still not 100% sure where the queen is, as I didn't see her..
Bee on lens..
Got 3 frames out of the Other, some frames in the top box had lots of honey, but with brood mixed in, so I left them. Come back in a month.
Metropolis below, a bit quiet, but I got 1 full frame out of there....
Over in Alphington a bit later that day, I hadn't checked Baghdad for ages...
Edis was ready to collect.
Under the hive mat, pretty calm. Little did we know....
Heaps of honey in the top box.
Of the 8 frames, there were only the outside 2 that were not fully capped, so I grabbed the 6 and 2 from below, that were not technically capped, but were crazy free-stylin comb that had not been hanging straight, and the girls had filled in the gaps with weird comb-shapes.
.
Edis pretty happy, at last the they were coughing up the rent.
.
.
.
Next day Adrian came over and we spun the honey out. Big night, very sticky.
here's the wax we got out while we were at it, a layer over an inch thick. Not sure what to do with it all, maybe candles. Not sure I could be bothered...
.
.
The collection bucket was almost full....
20 litres all up, out of 12 frames, mostly into the three 5-litre buckets, and a whole lot of baby-food jars and sundry other jars (Adrian has had a few other things on lately...)
.
.
.
what I didn't mention in here is that over 3 days I got absolutely hammered with stings, the girls are not happy to let you grab their honey, At ALL.
I reckon at least 15 stings on 3 separate occasions, due to being under-dressed, bees getting under the gusset of my suit, under my gloves, and just stinging me through the suit, generally. I need to get wise about this, the pain is not good. Edis got stung too, through his cord pants and via his pockets. Ouch.
++++++++++++++ ooooooooooooo ++++++++++++++
STING TALLY: this season
Jonas : 30
Adrian : 1
Edis : 6
Jazmina : 3
++++++++++++++ ooooooooooooo ++++++++++++++
HONEY TALLY:
2010/11: 34 litres
20011/12: 31 Litres so far.
No comments:
Post a Comment