Well, since I didn't start this journal on the first day of beekeeeping, here's a short summary of the past six days


Friday- Paul helped me install two five frame nucleus hives. In addition to the five frames of brood/honey, we added four frames of waxed rite-cell foundation in the deep brood boxes. Gave each hive 1/2 gallon of 1:1 sugar syrup in a Mann-Lake top feeder with the inner cover below the feeder to discourage the bees from building burr comb in the open spaces inside the feeder. The entrance reducer was set to the larger 4 inch opening.


Saturday- We worked in the garden most of the day, and I took as many bee observation breaks as Elizabeth would tolerate. I really liked watching them coming back from foraging flights, and was very happy that the bees didn't seem to mind if I sat about 5 or 6 feet away and to the side of the entrance. I saw many bees coming back to the hive with sacs of pollen attached to their hind legs. The bees in the yellow hive seemed to have begun to discover the syrup in the feeder, but not the green hive. From casual observation, it seems that the green hive has about twice as many bees coming and going from the entrance.


Sunday- Again, the green hive was observed to be foraging more actively, but the yellow hive was taking more sugar syrup from the feeder.


Monday- Paid attention to the flight paths of the bees. The hives are located in a closed off corner of the garden to prevent dog interference, and they are facing away from our main garden path. This placement was intended to force the foraging bees to spiral upward from the hive entrance before making their "bee-line" to whatever nectar source was nearby. This works really well because it prevents the bees from buzzing right through our yard at human eye level. Many bees were seen foraging on the privet by the deck. I noticed that some pollen being collected by individual bees varies in color. The pollen ranges from off-white, every shade of yellow, orange, even grey and brown.


Today it was clear that the yellow hive is taking a LOT of syrup, but the green hive has left it mostly untouched even though they have clearly discovered it. I'm not worried too much, as the green hive appears to be foraging well and I've read that bees will ignore sugar syrup if there is a good nectar flow going on. I emailed my mentor concerning one hive's choice not to take the syrup, and he offered to lend me an entrance feeder for that hive to see if that would increase their desire for syrup.


Tuesday- I went to my mentor's house to borrow the entrance feeder. I brought along a couple of hardy begonia plants from our garden for my mentor's wife, and we ended up having a nice conversation about southern gardening, bees, and travels through New Mexico. In order to install this new feeder, I had to remove the entrance reducer from the green hive. I gave them a quart jar full of 1:1 syrup and they took about 20% of it during the afternoon.


Wednesday- Today the bees decided to play some tricks on me. First, I inspected the feeder in the green hive to discover that they were now rapidly taking the syrup from the top feeder that had been ignored all week. I'm not sure if they were just slow to discover it or if the entrance feeder had somehow encouraged them to accept the syrup. I also noticed that today was probably the last day for the privet blossoms, at least for the ones in our yard.


Around 4:00, I finished mulching the back shady areas of the yard/garden, and noticed an incredible amount of activity around the green hive. There were at least 5 times as many bees clustered at the entrance and there were what looked like hundreds of bees swirling around the hive. At first, I was concerned that another local hive had discovered the new entrance feeder and had arrived to rob my hive of all it's honey stores. But as I observed, I saw that none of the bees at the entrance seemed agitated and there were no fights going on between individual bees. So I went inside to research this behavior and soon realized that I had just witnessed brand new baby bees taking their first orientation flight. I read that this behavior happens most days in the afternoon when brood are maturing, and that it can last from 10-30 minutes. Sure enough, when I came back to the hive 30 minutes later, this swirling swarm of baby bees had either gone back into their hive or gone off in search for nectar. It was business as usual.


This evening, we were going to do a hive inspection, but have decided to wait until. Friday morning so that we can fully document the frames with photos and take notes on what changes we are making to the hives. Hopefully they are drawing out good straight comb on the rite-cell plastic foundation.


The yellow hive was out of syrup, so I made up about a gallon of syrup: two quart jars for the green hive's entrance feeder and about a half gallon for the yellow hive feeder. I went out with my headlamp and was a bit surprised to find bees crawling around inside the feeder where they should not have been able to get. I found a crack in the metal screen through which they were coming and going. I used my bee brush to gently move the bees out of the feeder before filling both sides of the feeder. I will need to adjust that screen so that this does not happen every time they finish off their syrup. The green hive will need more syrup tomorrow, as their top feeder is almost empty.


From here on, I'll try to make an update to this journal whenever I am doing something inside the hive or when I observe something new to me.