animals in your life

[billy rubin]

queens comi ng thursday next

went to the one hive i have behi d the warehouse. its now 5 boxes tall, two boxes with brood, one with honey, two being filled.

about 6 queen cells in the brood. not sealed yet, but the real thing. killed them all to keep the hive from swarming.

i work in the day so i cant get into the hive during the period when the fielders are all out. so in the afternoon when i go in all the old irritable bees are home and they sting the shit out of me. i try to go in and out as quick as i can but they are quicker than me.

today and tomorrow is cold but i have to breakbtbe hive in two anyway to slow it down. that should keep it out of trouble until i can take it apart and install queens into the divides

[billy rubin]

th eday continues.

a bit of sun between showers and i split the hive into two, three boxes high. one has the queen and one doesn't. this will keep thyem until th eend of this comng week. but in h emeantime i saw something ive never seen. hive beetles.



little bastards can destroy a weak hive when th enumbers get big.

like all bee parasites, this one came in on bees smuggled into florida from overseas. unlike new zealand, where animal smuggling can cost a lo of money, the penalty in the US is just $1000 per offense, so for somebody who wants cheap bees by the ton, its not a deterrent.

ive never seen them before anywhere until a half hour ago. there are various strategies, bith chemical and physical, but nothing is ever cheap and id have preferred not to discover them.

wrking the bees in bad weather gets me stung too much. i think ive taken thirty or forty stings from these things yesterday and today. im out of pratice so they hurt more than they will later on.

[The Magic Pudding.]

ive never seen them before anywhere until a half hour ago. there are various strategies, bith chemical and physical, but nothing is ever cheap and id have preferred not to discover them.

Traps with sticky boards or Fipronil based bait shouldn't cost much.

[billy rubin]

https://www.dadant.com/catalog/m01545-beetle-bee-gone

youre right

i have no experience with the beetles but if this works then it appears to be manageable.

medication was a major cost for me with a bunch of hives. and this colony got through the winter with nothing but varroa treatment

[billy rubin]

well, bhisma has run ygmir out of my chair, with three of these




ygmir was asleep and minding his own business when she came downstairs with the first one and dropped it on top of him.

being blind and at a disadvantage,  ygmir did not contest the usurpation and retreated. bhisma now controls my chair



i may take this opprtunity to reassert my own control over my chsir, but bhisma has to have somewhere to go first, i supposr

[Tank]

Awwwwww so cute!

[MarcusA]

I don't like to keep pets because I think that it is cruel in a way. I am not a vegan.

[billy rubin]

queens are in. i expected them through the post, but they didnt show. then the UPS parcel service delivered them.

very unexpected

i have five single story colonies waiting right now, so ill give them an hour at close of day and then slip the queens in

[billy rubin]

 i hate working bees in the later afternoon. all the fielders are in, and they dont like me messing with them.

anyway, the little single highs have been queenless a day or so now, and ive fed them syrup through this particular dearth.

no nectar coming in at the moment.

and so they were all ready for an improvement in their lives



queens came in the usual minicages in a box with about two ounces of nurse bees





currently the photo ap wont do much for me.  but anyway, i got all five opened and the queens slipped down into some brood. theres a short candy tube in the end of each cage  that takes about three days for the bees to eat through. when they do, theyve forgotten that theyve never seen this particular queen before and all should be well.

hurry this process and theyll kill the new queen in a minute. you have to let them do it the way they want.

in fact, thats the whole thing about beekeeping in general-- they have no obligation to stay in your box, and will blow the moment they think they have a better gig somewhere else.

so you have to figure out what it is that they want, and then give it to them. else they just pack up and leave.

[billy rubin]

here we go. heres one mated carniolan queen aboyt two weeks old in a minicage. the black tube is packed with soft sugar candy and is open to the outside once the candy is eaten



and heres a really good frame of brood from the old queen. she was great. i havent killed her and have just relocated her to another hive and put the new queens in with some of her brood.



im m aking these divides pretty thin, because im going for numbers and not anything else. so i use two frames of brood, two frames of pollen, two frames of honey, and two empty frames. my brood boxes hold eight frames, which is an antique way of doing it here in the states, but it works well if you pay attention to them. if you dont. they swarm pretty quickly

i used to have dramatic problems with swarming. hollywood potential. but im better at it now.

bees have a weired way with sex chromosomes. generally speaking, . humans have two--= X and Y. bees have about twenty.

a worker bee is heterozygous for one chromosome from her mother, and another from one of possibly twent fathers.

onl;y heterozygous bees live. homozygous bees die.

so you want the queens to mate with as many drones as possibe, to increase th echances that all the brood is heterozygous. that soldi fram of brood above has almost no skips, which means that queen diddled with drones who were all differently chromosomesd from her.

remember queens and workers are diploid, and drones are haploid. so a dron has only a songle type of sperm to offer, and if its the same as the one the queen contributes to a worker egg, it dies.

queens mate with fifteen or twenty drones on two or three mating flights whnen theyre about ten or eleven days old. got to have good weather.

thes queens were delayed a week because califonia was rainy and none of thr queens could get out to do the wild thing

[billy rubin]

queenless bees dont like being queenless. they know its a death sentence for the hive. here's a quenn i set on th etop bars of a queen less hive.



and here it is about 30 seconds later



you cant see it but all the workers on the top bars were turning and runnign to that queen cage

[MarcusA]

To bee or not to bee - that is the question.

[Dark Lightning]

queenless bees dont like being queenless. they know its a death sentence for the hive. here's a quenn i set on th etop bars of a queen less hive.



and here it is about 30 seconds later



you cant see it but all the workers on the top bars were turning and runnign to that queen cage

What does that mean?

[billy rubin]

they were excited to see her

if tbe hive had had a queen they would have ignored her

[Tank]

Absolutely fascinating!