I fed the bees tonight. I filled up their sugar syrup feeders (upside down plastic peanut butter jars with small holes in the lid). The feeders sit on a couple of sticks over the hole in the inner cover (the sticks give the bees room to crawl up around).
They had emptied the jars I put there on Saturday - I figured they would. At around 7:00PM tonight I popped open the top, and took out the empty jar. There were about 30 bees on the jar and about that many looking at me from the hole, so I gave the empty jug a quick shake to shake off the bees, and quickly put back on the new jar. Then I closed up the top. I did it quick enough that I didn't need any smoke, and the girls didn't seem to mind too much (but I'm sure they would mind if I took too much time!). I exchanged jars in both hives - the bees didn't give me any trouble, but the mosquitoes did! Sheesh, fresh meat!
I also drizzled some sugar syrup into the water bucket I made up for them. The syrup has a little bit of lemongrass oil in it - hopefully that'll attract the bees, and they will drink from my bucket.
And for something somewhat related, look at this picture of a bus with beehives in it (click for a larger version):
Each of those colored panels is a beehive (some are 3 hives tall). I wonder if he gets stopped by the police often, or are they afraid?
I love the truck photo. Here they use transport trucks with hives on pallets and netting over them. I've never seen one except in photos but last year one was going too fast in the rain on a highway on ramp and tipped over (in New Brunswick). They managed to get the workers back and load everything up and they ended up not losing any hives and few bees.
ReplyDelete