Bees

Prior to getting lots of rain during the past week, things were getting pretty dry around here, so dry, I was worried about the bees not finding any flowers since all our vegetation was turning brown. As you can see, I started putting out a jar of sugar water, which they emptied daily.

K7 (here) and K8 took turns retrieving the jar, then taking out a newly mixed batch.  Notice how low the water level got in the pond during the dry spell.

After the first rain, I decided to open the box and check on the hive. The first step is to gently lift the top and put a few puffs of smoke inside to calm the bees.

Then pry the cover off, which is stuck tight by accumulated sticky wax.

A little more smoke and...

...I removed the entire top box because the bees had eaten all of their stored honey due to the lack of nectar flow during the long dry spell. This picture shows lots of bees sitting on a metal grill, which is a queen excluder - regular worker bees can fit through the bars coming up from the brood boxes below to store honey in the upper box. The queen is too large to fit through the bars, hence she can not lay any eggs in among the honey combs. The bottom two boxes are for her to lay eggs in honey combs. I put a brand new box back on top with 10 clean, new frames on which the worker bees can build new comb and fill with honey before the winter.

This is one of the frames I took out of the old top box. The bees had eaten all the stored honey, but had recently begun to re-fill with new honey. Yummy, it was so sweet and tasty!

His reward for taking out and bringing back the sugar water jars. No complaints from the work crew.