Keep the grass clipped around fence

Today, I noticed that grass had sprung up around the electric fence.  I have roofing shingles laid on the ground under it but it's surprising, still, how quickly grass and weeds grow between any cracks or to each side of the ground cover.  I'm glad I checked.  Anything touching the fence wires causes a reduction of electrical charge.  That's what happened last year.  While away, grass grew and touched the fence wires which weakened the charge and the bears attacked the hive...and came back for more!  A nightmare that I don't want to have happen again.

So keep the grass clipped to make sure nothing touches your fence wires!

May 27th and bees doing well

I've been watching the bees all month and can report that things look pretty normal.

The left hive is loaded with bees and I think I'll be taking off the entrance reducer soon because, with this hot weather, the entrance is pretty crowded.  I think the hive is strong enough to keep out any enemies.  I may wait one more week though.

The right hive is the new one.  It's interesting to see them side by side because the new hive has much fewer bees.  I study it to make sure the bees are bringing in lots of pollen and it seems they are.  I haven't wanted to go back into the hive again after disrupting them a few times a few weeks ago.  But I will go into both hives next week and give them a good inspection:

• clean out any comb that is where it shouldn't be, or in a pattern that's odd like the one I showed on May 7th in this blog
• scrape off propolis that might be causing frames and boxes to fuse together
• check to make sure I see cells filled with larvae since that'll tell me I still had a queen within a few days
• clean out any debris or dead bees if needed

With my new marine battery, I'm not worrying about changing D cell batteries monthly and hoping they don't run out sooner.  I recharged the battery a week ago and it only took 20 minutes to recharge.  fIt had about 3 weeks of use at the time so if I'm carefully to not let any grass or plants touch the wire, I should be ok for at least a few months before needing to recharge.

However, I will be checking it often anyway, to make sure.

Pollen colors

I find it fun to check on the color of the pollen the bees are bringing in.  Over the past few weeks, it's bright orange, lemon yellow and an off-white color.  When I open the hive and look at frames, I expect those are the colors I'll see on the frames too. 

Bees loving the moss on rocks around pond

Bees on moss

As I was getting ready to drain my pond to clean it and separate the water lilies, I realized that bees were flocking to the moss on a few of the rocks.  I've never noticed that before, but I've seen the bees drinking the water when they can find a leaf or other safe spot to drink without drowning. Perhaps they are drinking from the moisture in the moss.

bees on moss that grows on rocks around pond

 Yesterday, May 6th, I went into the two hives to see how they were doing.

A look at Hive #1

Hive #1 on left

Hive #1 is the one that survived last winter and I hadn't gone into the bottom deep yet this year so that was one task.  Wow.  I had two broken frames in there and the bees had built comb everywhere, including the sides of the hive.  One of the broken frames, was loaded with brood and I didn't know what to do with it so I put it aside and did some research.  I found that someone mentioned placing it as intact as possible onto a new frame that had no comb on it and use elastics to hold it in place.  The bees would patch it up.  So that's what I did to one of them.  The other broken frame didn't have that much brood on it so I just replaced it with an empty frame.

I'm glad I did it now because I don't get into the bottom deep very often.  Once I have two deeps on, later in the summer, the top deep is too heavy for me to be lifting off so doing it in the spring, when there are fewer bees and less honey in the hive, makes it easier.  The top deep gets looked at and cleaned where needed more often.

Checking Hive#2

Hive #2 looks good.  There were many frames with brood and larvae and pollen and some capped honey...looks like a good, healthy queen is laying lots of eggs. And the comb pattern is normal.

However, I found these two frames with this odd comb pattern shown below. I've never seen this before and wasn't sure what to do.  I ended up putting them back into the hive, hoping they all get filled in eventually.  But then this morning I sent the photo below to the local beekeeping group to see if anyone knows anything about this sort of pattern to see what it means, if anything. I wondered if I should replace these but I don't have any frames that are already built with comb.  If I did, I would have just replaced these with others.  But all I have are bare frames in my "extra" pile. We'll see if anyone else has an answer.