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Old 04-23-2017, 05:49 PM   #113
longknocker
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Default Re: New Hobby: Bee Keeping

Quote:
Originally Posted by massphatness View Post
Bees, when given a width of more than about 3/8" of an inch to work with (called bee space) start to fill in that space with honey comb. The whole point of the hive frames is to give the bees a manageable area for them to build out comb in an orderly fashion. What happened in the case of my hive is that the queen cage took up a slot where a frame would normally sit. The bees did what bees do, and instead of limiting their building to the frames, they also started hanging comb from the inner cover down into the empty space where a frame would normally reside.

So while it looks cool, it's unworkable because I can't have random comb hanging down into to the hive since I'll be doing periodic inspections, and the comb is eventually going to break and make a mess of things both in the hive & for me.

So here's what I'm dealing with:




I had to make a decision, and after some gnashing of teeth and a few soothing words from Grace, we broke the comb away from the inner cover and brushed the bees back into the hive as best we could. With the comb gone, I easily inserted the frame where it would have been had the queen cage not been there.

The stress inducing part in all of this is that I couldn't find the queen. She comes marked with a dot -- literally a yellow sharpie dot on her back for ease of identification. But she could be anywhere within the hive, and it's pretty easy for a 5-thumbed bull in a china closet fat guy to inadvertently squash her.

As you saw in the video, I knew she had made it out of her cage. Here's a shot of the empty cage:


The hole at the bottom was once filled with candy and capped with a bit of cork. The queen eats the candy from the inside of the cage while the worker bees eat from the outside (after I had removed the cork), and she walks through that hole after a few days.

But I still didn't know if she was alive or where she was in the hive.

I need to digress for a moment. I believe in karma. Call it God, Allah, Jesus, Mother Earth, Eywah - whatever, but I believe there is some force out there greater than all of us, and that if you do the right thing often enough, you are rewarded with the right thing being done back.

Sometimes this manifests itself in small ways. I spent a good couple hours on a plane ride today playing peekaboo and making funny faces with a kid who was probably 9 or 10 months old. If I stopped, the kid cried -- and I mean screamed -- so I kept it up all though the flight. It was actually a fun way to pass the time since JetBlue's internet service doesn't work over open ocean; plus I'm a goofy basterd at heart.

Anyway, Grace is watching me come unglued over the situation with the honey comb in the hive and the status of the queen when she looks down and right in front of her feet is the queen! As near I can tell, she must have been in the mass of bees on the comb and fallen to the ground. Grace happened to notice a few bees on the ground, and one of them also happened to be the queen! Karma? Coincidence? No matter - I very gingerly picked her up by having her walk on to my bee brush & transported her back into the hive.
Good On You, Brother!
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