Thursday, April 3, 2014

Orientation 4.1.14

Most everyday the Honey Bees do an orientation. It gives all the young bees a chance to come out and find where their hive is. They circle around and each day venture farther. Eventually they become foragers.

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It lasts 15 minutes to half an hour….then they all head back inside and go back to work.

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They climb up the face of the hive and take off….and through all of this the foragers are still coming home loaded down.

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The video only catches a small portion of the bees that are orientating. The air overhead has a lot of them circling around.

My “blue”  hive is now the the largest and this is their orientation. My “pink” hive may have cast off a swarm while we were gone, but hoping they now have a new Queen and will start building. I think I saw a few capped brood cells through the window in the back of the hive…but the bees were covering it pretty heavily and could only get a glimpse when they moved out of the way. They are bringing in a lot of pollen and that is a good sign. They need it to make “bee bread” which is fed to the larva and newly hatched bees.

The windows are great…but sure wish I had an observation hive.

I’ve ordered 2  IPK Small Hive Beetle traps from www.greenbeehives.com  to put under the hives. When they arrive I’ll do a better inspection since I will have to take the boxes apart to move them onto it. The trap will have a tray with mineral oil in it. Once the SHB fall into it they are done. Same with any larva that might hatch and look for a way out of the hive to pupate in the ground and become more beetles.

Hope I will be doing a post on them before long.

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