Bee Dance

For those interested, Karl Ritter von Frisch won the Nobel Peace Prize for discovering the Bee Dance, where a bee, finding a great amount of nectar in the field, returns to the hive and creates this dance by doing a gyration of circles that are suppose to tell the other bees where it is located. 

Although not a scientist, I have watched bees returning to the my hives and have seen most of these dances go unnoticed by the other bees. My own hypothesis is: if you know that all the bees inside the hive are actually not gatherers, but really housekeeping bees, is that; a bee, released from her mundane duties of tending to the needs of the hive, is given permission to leave the hive and fly away in search of nectar or pollen or water, but mainly is able to be free at last, to escape. She fly's away wandering, to search and gather the needs of the hive, no care in the world, and upon returning, is so excited about her adventures that she cannot help but be excited about these adventures. Spinning around in circles, I can her her say " holy fuck, what a great day I've had, at one point I almost got hit by a bus, and these huge fucking flying things kept trying to catch and eat me.  Later

Queen-less hive

During my morning check I saw no activity from  (I'll call it my Mexican hive, after the source) so I just completed a thorough investigation and found only a couple hundred bees still alive, no brood and no queen. So it looks as though they killed her upon installation.  If there had been more bees, I would have taken some eggs from my Nuc hive and transplanted them, but, short of bees, I decided to move the hive over to the nuc hive and place it on the bottom.

I was going to harvest some honey from the Nuc hive but when I pulled the outside-most frame I found that the frame itself was full of capped honey, but because it was a frame for a super, it was short of the bottom and they had filled it in with comb and it was solid with capped brood, hardly a cell open.  Will have to watch and make sure they don't leave like last years colonies.  With the addition of 2 8" boxes at the bottom, I'm hoping all will be well with them.  This is the hive that had to make a new queen and today is the day the new fliers are to come out.


So I'm down to 3 very active hives and they all have lots of room so keeping my fingers crossed.  Later