Mysteries and Discoveries

Sept 16

September is the month of the fall harvest for the bees, the late harvest of honey. Any later and they may not be able to collect enough pollen (their protein) to help them through the winter months. Here in southern Louisiana, winters are not cold but pollen isn't readily available. I watched today as the foragers trucked in bright yellow pollen in their “bees knees” baskets, entering directly through the round vent holes into the brood chamber and the honey supers. Busy little girls!

It's almost time to cut the wild yard back. Some weeds have grown, if not as high as an elephant's eye, then at least at high as my eyes, without ever providing blossoms and their gifts of pollen and/or nectar. I want to mark the beneficial weeds (read those with pollen) so I know where they will be next year. This summer we let everything grow and cut paths to the water source and the hives. Next year I'd like to be more selective in what is left alone to grow.

We went from 3 short hives to 2 tall hives this year. When we noticed hives 1 and 2 were weak, we combined them. This was a first, combining hives. We took out the marked queen from the first hive and placed her in the observation hive; then we covered the top of the second hive with newspaper and stacked the supers from the first hive on top of that, brood chambers and honey supers both. The bees quickly ate through the newspapers to meet their new hive mates, and hive 2 became very strong this summer.  

The funny thing was when we removed the old queen (marked with a red dot to signify when we had added her to the hive) to the observation hive on a brood frame, we discovered we had also removed a new queen, not even laying eggs yet, on the other side of the frame. They passed each other coming and going for about a week, then one day we noticed the new queen (without identifying dot) was laying and the old queen was missing. We had seen the old queen only the day before. We didn't get to see the changing of the queen, however that happened. There are mysteries here, and that is as it should be. What would life be without mysteries and the prospect of discoveries?