Worrying this Image Around

Something to think on.

Summer Rains Bring Flowers

On the south ridge behind the capitol.

Hyper or Not I Like A Lot of These Paintings

Liz gave me the link to Hyperallergic, an art blog, at http://hyperallergic.com. This article in particular i found interesting. http://hyperallergic.com/74330/the-new-casualists-strike-again/

Follow the links to find http://garisandhahn.com/portfolio/dying-on-stage-new-painting-in-new-york/ a page of many interesting paintings.

Bees are HOT

This photo is typical for the 'Swarm hive' the last couple of days. Temps in the mid to high 90s, with lots and lots of sun. I don't think this is a sign of swarming, there are just too many bees for the temperature. The Maria hive also has bees hanging out on the porch, but not like this!

They were still working on the top super the other day. Better check again soon.

More Work in Progress

Should say, more on this particular painting.

Moving Bees Around

The Maria hive was looking under-workered in comparison to the Swarm hive, AND the Swarm hive was showing signs of swarming, bearding, lots of bees in the hive. So we moved five or six frames of bees and capped brood from Swarm to Maria. While doing that we inserted those bees into a hive body (large) box above the original hive body, and a honey super added recently. So we have a bunch of strange bees going into the middle of the Maria hive. Standard practice is to use newspaper to separate the different origin bees from the others until they get used to the new queen smell. This keeps them from fighting the original occupants. We did this on a Monday. On Saturday, the pictures below show how much newspaper the had removed -- 3 layers above, 3 layers below!

Top layer between queen excluder and top hive body.

Top layer from the bottom of the super and queen excluder grill.

You can see there are a lot fewer bees in the honey super than in the hive bodies below. Addition of the new bees and removal of the newspaper appear to have kept them pretty busy.

Above the original hive body with the queen.

I did rip out the remaining paper to save the bees the trouble.

Nina Pinta and Maria

Cropped photo of the Maria queen. 6/4/13. Carniolan with the red spot. That's how you can 'spot' her. Heh.

Chris and Maggie working on Nina hive. Just put that in here because of the cool smoke.

It's going to be really interesting to see how these hives do without all the flowers in town to visit.