Sunday, September 25, 2011

Kizzling Around with the Bees

My friend, Erica (from "Kizzling Around",) came to visit this weekend. She took some really awesome pictures of the bees while she was here. Here is a picture of Erica all bee-suited up:

Here is a picture that I am actually really worried by. I am not sure how I spotted this, since bee eggs are very small, but I am sure that I saw two eggs in one cell. I read that the queen only ever lays one egg per cell, and if you see two eggs in a cell you almost certainly have a laying worker. Eggs look like a miniature, slender grain of rice in the center of a cell standing on end. Here is the cell that I think has two eggs in it (you can see that the surrounding cells have one egg per cell):
 
Here is a really high resolution picture that Erica took of some more bee eggs:

Here is a picture that Erica took of some larvae (the white things in some of the uncapped cells):

Another concerning thing that I spotted was this beetle (hiding in a cell, I found another one in the feeder, but I only saw two):

I also found this little bit of burr comb between the top and bottom deep (I scraped it off and saved it):

Here one more nice photo (of bees taking off and landing at the entrance of the hive):

Other than taking photos, I also fed the bees and started the fall treatment of Apiguard so I can ready the bees for the winter.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Mom Releases the Bees

So at the last minute, Mom called in an exterminator to exterminate the termites in her house. Since the exterminators were going to be going around the outside of the house, we thought it would be best to close the bees up that day. The exterminators finished up around 2pm, so I probably wouldn't be able to let the bees out until after work. I convinced Mom that she could let the bees out without me since it was very hot out and the bees probably wanted to get out (all she would have to do is pull out 2 nails then run away). Here's how far she got:

Overall, the bees were out and Mom was very brave for releasing them on her own :)