Post Mostly For The Birdchick....

Leaving, for the moment, the Transcribing that has become my world, and Miss Kitty's for that matter, as I have no intention of suffering alone, let's move onto Bees...

(We are transcribing a 2 hour 10 minute interview between Someone who may be our Boss and Someone Else. Very interesting indeed, but the sound quality of the recording is Very Bad. Makes for slow going. I'd say more, but we Assistants are not a chatty bunch some days)

Right. Bees. That I can chat about. The Birdchick is away today, off doing Bird Things, so Boss and I were sent a list of Hive Things that needed to be done. I like, generally to do the Colour Commentary, and leave the step by step to The Birdchick, but since she was not here today, I am going to try and write as her and Tell All.

I feel, sadly, as tho my venture into this, the being of the Birdchick, is a venture not entirely certain to succeed, in fact it may well, not, and perhaps we could go as far to say, no it will not succeed in coming up to her standards, as I have no camera, or any way of displaying the images that no doubt ought to go along with said record.

(ok, ok, so I have been reading a little too much Steve Brust's Phoenix Guards, and 500 Years after lately, why use four words, when you can say it in a hundred? I'll stop, but they are well worth re-reading even if one does tend to get a little wordy, great fun.)

Our first task was to check and see if Queen Kitty had gotten out of her Queen Container and was inside the hive laying brood. When you divide a hive, as opposed to getting a box of bees for a new hive, where the Queen is in her box with the bees and they all dig each other, you have to let the bees you have taken from the old hive get used to the new Queen. She is in a plastic container with holes, that is plugged with hard sugar. The bees eat the sugar and she comes out , and they are friends.

If they are not friends, they kill her.

She had not been eaten out yet, tho nearly. (You stick the container with Queen onto a frame with comb on it.) I wonder if it was because she was on a frame near the edge of the box? There were not many bees near her, tending and eating. We moved her more into the middle, so hopefully more bees will get her scent, and eat her out.

We did notice there seemed to be a new Queen cell, which is a baby Queen. Not sure what this means. You can tell, because they are much bigger. (I did not notice, but Boss knows a LOT about Bees.)

We checked the Olga Hive, which I like to call in technical bee terms, the " We got some honey going ON hive" All well there. We took out her Sugar water bucket, as she does not need it. Obviously.

Going down to the Bickman and Mimiko hives, we found that all seemed well in the Bickman Hive, very active.

On the Mimko hive, we were to add a brood box if they had filled up 7 frames with comb. She had, so we took one frame, with no brood in it (confuses the nurse bees) and put it in the new box, to encourage them to go up there and do bee things. We gave her a new sugar water bucket. She was making a little Funky Comb, on top of the frames, which we scraped off.

We also set out carpet tack boards around the hives. They are slats of wood with nails sticking up. Discourages the heck out of skunks.

There you have it. The Birdchick will, one hopes, be home soon, and can get back to doing her own Bee Reports, and I can get back to saying things like: WOW, how cool, I was totally Covered in Bees!!!!!!!!

Love and Bees, (but not transcribing) Lorraine