Friday, June 3, 2011

The Bees Are Crazy!

Adam looked in one of the Warre hives today, and found a bizarre situation. In the photo below, you see three boxes, with handles.  (Ignore the very top, little box; it's only full of sawdust.) Anyway, the top handled box was added last, and it's full of frames for the bees to build new comb on. They'd already filled out comb in the bottom two boxes. Adam wanted them to move up, into a new box.
Well, they did, but they did it in a wacky way! Here's the middle box -- the one the bees should have been moving from, into the new, top box. But instead of building comb attached to the frames hanging in the top box, they just built comb up from below. Adam says he's never heard of this before. It looks like big bubbles of foam.
A top view:

Adam had to remove this comb; it can't stay. He has to get the bees to build straight comb from the frames. So he pulled out his metal hive tool, and began prying the comb off. It's attached with sticky bee-glue. They glue everything together.
Adam deposited the comb into a separate container. He left it there, in the grass, for them to clean up and use, if they like. It had honey in it :)

1 comment:

Pom Pom said...

That IS weird honeycomb. It's so amazing!