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.

Hive Splits

Farm Team - 5/27/13

Here's the new "farm team". These hives were split from our existing bees, and queened with some Hawaiian Carniolan fertile queens. We'll see how that goes. Left/West hive came from Swarm hive, Right/East hive from one of the Dave A field hives. Notice the lilac blooming right now just behind the hives. Hope that gives them something to go on out there on the windswept hills. Also note new hive stand.

We have made 3 splits then, one from each of the hives that made it through the winter, all splits queened with one of the Hawaiian Carniolans.

Swarm Hive Split

On Tuesday, 5/21, Nice day in the middle of rainy cool period. Sunny and mid 70s for a high.

We have a plan to split all 3 of the drives that have survived, starting with swarm hive.

SPLIT (first split):

Starting about 1230 we began going through swarm hive looking for queen, supercedure cells, and swarm cells. The hive was packed with bees. No outward signs of swarming, however, over last week. Mix of frames with a lot of capped brood. Only a few super frames with larvae. Seemed to be a variety of larvae sizes. Did not see any cells with eggs, but they are hard
to spot, and there were bees all over the frames. Hard to see. No supercedure or swarm cells. Seemed like a lot of drones, but still they are only about 5% or less of population, and there were lots and
lots of bees. Could not find the queen.

Created a split hive containing the following: Took 6 deep frames, with bees,  containing mixture of honey, pollen, and capped brood. Added a couple of
honey deeps (no bees) to the hive box. To that, added one super box and took one super frame that seemed to have the most larvae uncapped, of various sizes, and 8 super frames with and without honey.

Took this split hive out to new farm location and set it up.

Split hive:

------------
top cover
inner cover
super (S)      <--- one frame with larvae and bees
hive body (H)  <--- bees and capped brood
bottom board
------------

Swarm hive:

------------
top cover
inner cover
super          <--- bees and misc frames
hive body      <--- queen should be in one of
hive body      <---   these boxes ?
bottom board
------------

Since we are in some doubt about eggs in the frame we moved to Split hive, considering buying a queen for this new hive. Also considering queening the
other two split hives.

Thursday, Chris went to Columbus and picked up 3 fertilized queens. These will go in the split hives.

Price Prehistory Museum

Entry to the Price, UT, museum of Prehistory

I believe this is some kind of Utah Raptor.

Cleaners

Heights Cleaners, Albuquerque, NM. Next to Ruben's Grill, good Mexican food.

First cut at abstracting an image. Cropped, posterized, and edited out a white car on right of building.