Bees, wonderful bees!!

[lesa]

Wow, Jim, that was quite an adventure! Glad you and your bees got home safely!
Journey, I hear you on the weather. I was so pleased the bees made it through the winter, now I am worried they won't survive spring! Rain is in the forecast, for the next 10 days!!

 

[vfem]

Congrats Jim and Congrats Thistle!!!!

We're still waiting on our bees, only a couple more weeks at most.

 

[journey11]

Wow, Jim, that was quite an adventure! Glad you and your bees got home safely!
Journey, I hear you on the weather. I was so pleased the bees made it through the winter, now I am worried they won't survive spring! Rain is in the forecast, for the next 10 days!!

I know this odd weather has to be affecting them. I just don't have enough experience to figure how they will respond to it. It has to be cutting into their spring build up, since they need to be gathering pollen. I was afraid my bees would swarm early because they were a bit honey-bound coming out of winter, but now I'm afraid they'll have trouble building up and they'll probably use up that extra honey quickly.

Hope we get some honey to harvest this year!

 

[KevsFarm]

crappy weather here lately as well, but today was decent, sunny a little wind.Today was the first day my new girls were out and bringing in pollen.They've been gobbling down the 1/1 syrup.

 

[JimWWhite]

I thought I'd uploaded these pics before of Teresa checking the hives. We just set up 3 new ones and installed a box of bees and a queen in each one. That was about 3 weeks ago and now they're pretty well settled in and are going out foraging every day. We've had really good weather since they were put in so I suspect they've already been collecting nectar and pollen. We've been feeding the new ones sugar water but we've noticed they've been using less and less of it now they have found the real stuff. These are pics of the original hive that's been in use for a year now.

These appear to be brood cells which came from the outer frames of the main hive body. That's capped honey in the upper right hand corner.

Teresa smoking the joint up.

This is a honey storage frame. The capped cells are already honey where the uncapped ones are nectar and pollen drying down to about 23% moisture before they cap them off. All the cells on this frame are either full of nectar/pollen or honey.

 

[Collector]

Those are some nice action pics Jim.