The Trough

Buzzing bees

My first and most entertaining encounter with bees took place last week. We were kitted out in our space suits ready to check on Deborah’s hives at The Quadrangle in Kent. The suits were made of white cotton twill – hardly the thickest of fabrics but the white was supposed to keep the bees calmer . (Blue is supposed to agitate them like red does a bull).

You use smoke to make the bees believe there has been a forest fire so they all go back in to the Hive to eat honey – which makes them a little sleepy. I suppose this is something to do with keeping up energy reserves for a long journey to start a new hive. If my house were about to be burned down and there was a possibility I was going to die – I might also treat my self to a last meal.

Smoking the bees in space suits

We found the queen bee – she has a little dot of tip-ex painted on her back. I thought she would have been a giant slug like baby producer – but she was an elegant shade of chestnut with a long abdomen busily walking around tending to her brood.

Bee keeping tools

There are a number of tools that are used on the hives. Firstly (from the right hand side in the picture) a red Hive tool to open the hives, remove old comb and prize apart areas drenched in propolis. A feather to move unwanted bees, the vane of a feather doesn ‘t agitate them as much as a finger or stick. The yellow pronged instrument is to check on growing male larvae to see if they have varroa mite attached to them (as you can see here) male larvae seem to be worst of as they grow in larger cells. The metal section is used to fix the bee hives – any wholes or cracks appearing in them that could let other beasties in. I can’t remember what this one is for… I think its just to help open the hives. The Tip-ex is to mark the queen bee, and the last circular object is a queen bee excluder. It is a very small space for the queen and prevents her from laying in the comb but the workers can continue to make honey – you can get bigger ones that cut off the queen from entire ‘Supers’ (the boxes that sit on top of each other with the comb inside) to she has more space to walk around.

Lastly here is a picture of Ed – with a piece of ‘wild’ honey comb. Fantastic!

Ed and self organised honey comb

This entry was posted by Gallus bankiva on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 4:39 pm. It is filed under Bugs, bees and has these tags: bees, honey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.