Resourceful Bees!

As mentioned previously, I brought back the parts of a dead-out hive on Saturday. The top honey super had a bunch of black ants in it, so instead of putting it in my garage with the rest of the equipment (where the ants could get into the house - yuck!) I set it outside the garage door at the front of the house.

Well, Monday at work I get a call from my wife telling me that there were a bunch of bees coming and going from that super like it was a smorgasbord! It turns out that my bees from the backyard discovered that super, and it still had honey in it (and crystallized honey). When I got home I watched, and the bees would take off out of the buffet and zip around the side of the house back to the hives!

This is my first experience with any kind of surplus beekeeping equipment, so all of you experienced beekeepers are probably grinning knowingly at my mishap. You can't leave any old equipment laying around if it has any honey in it. The bees will find it!

That evening after the bees had gone in, I moved the super out to the backyard for them to feast on. But for the next 3 or 4 days there were always a few bees sniffing around the old location.

I took a video of the bees and their buffet:


Since I had the other brood boxes (with lots of frames of honey!) in the garage, I had to warn my wife not to open the door or the bees would "find" that. I don't mind bees dining in the outdoors, but I draw the line when it is in my garage.

In fact, when time came to take the deeps over to the other location (where I let those bees clean them out), by the time I had them loaded in my pickup truck, there were a few bees who had already found them!

Here's a picture of the bees and the supers for clean out: