Backyard Apiary

My asparagus is blooming and the bees seem to love it. There were honey bees, bumble bees and another blue-ish native bee.

It seems that a researcher in Switzerland found that signals from cell phones might have a negative effect on a hive and deserves more extensive studies. The researcher theorizes that the electromagnetic fields cause the foragers and older bees to not return to the hive. Read the article.

Seems that the article/”research” has been debunked as lacking proper sources and validity.

It’s probably a good thing I never got around to installing the wireless temperature and humidity sensors in to the hives. If I ever finish building them, I’ll need to conduct my own experiment by not installing them in every hive.

I inspected the caught swarm, the nuc, the split and the top bar hive. I ended the day with two stings; one to my left palm while holding a frame to take a picture and the other in my left thigh after a bee from Hegemone crawled up my pants.

The caught swarm is still very weak, but is alive. I’m viewing this hive as a banked queen more than anything else. It still has many months to get strong enough to try and survive the winter, but unlike the weak hive experiment from last winter I’ll scuttle the hive before wax moths get a chance to destroy the comb.

The nuc hive most likely has a laying worker. Many eggs were laid in the cells and I couldn’t find a queen despite looking very intently. There are a few ways of dealing with a laying worker hive (Bush Bees, Laying Workers). I have plenty of hives for my needs and the nuc hive is weak, so I will most likely just shake out the bees and end the hive.

The split is also weak, but the queen is looking plumper than I remember. I plan on feeding this hive frames of brood from Hegemone and the bought queen hive to keep those hives from swarming.

The top bar hive is doing amazingly well. They’ve drawn out most of the bars I merged in to the brood nest during the last inspection. There were 3-4 frames of solid capped brood and a few more with a mix of eggs, larvae and uncapped brood. I went through each frame and removed a few attachments that the bees made to the sides. The next TBH and top bars I make will have the guide further from the edges. This might help reduce the attachments because they only seem to attach the honey comb toward the top of the hive. There were 1-2 frames with a small attachments at the bottom. After doing a better job of leveling the hive during my last inspection, all of the comb is now perfectly straight. Glad I fixed that when I did because the comb hardens with age and wouldn’t have corrected itself as easily.