Listening to the Warre hive
Although we've only had
it for a short while, I can tell the Warre hive is good for my beekeeping
skills. I never even considered taking
photographs through the screened bottom of my Langstroth hives
because I knew I could just take the boxes apart whenever I felt like
it, but the camera and I have been making regular visits to the Warre
hive to see what's going on inside. Lately, I've taken to
pressing my ear up against each box too, which gives me an indication
of where the bees are actively working. All of this data without
bothering the bees at all!
Just this week, the colony
has finally moved down into the new
box we gave them three weeks ago. The slow movement
downward tells me that my weight-based guess was right --- the bees
hadn't worked on the top box yet at the time we nadired a new box
underneath.
Listening at the hive
Friday morning, the bottom box roared with bees building comb, the
second box roared with bees feeding brood, and the top box produced
more of a gentle growl. I suspect that the bees are using their
attic to dehydrate nectar into honey, thus the lower activity levels up
top.
In other bee-related
news, I never did make a decision about how
long to feed our package of bees. As a result, I'm
splitting the difference between the two extremes by letting the colony
wait a day or two after each infusion of sugar water. The white
clover is blooming pretty well, but it's been awfully dry here for the
last couple of weeks, and I'm just not sure how much nectar the flowers
are producing. My first buckwheat cover crop will probably start
blooming in a week or so, at which point, I might cut the bees off
their sugar water.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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