Just showered off from being outside working the hive. Summer is well and truly here, sweltering, steamy and sunshiny, complete with the high crescendo of cicadas and distant afternoon thunder, promising but never quite delivering cool rain.
I opened the hive today with the intention of removing the mound of melted comb slumped onto the bottom of the box, so I went in as fully equipped as I could with long rubber gloves, long sleeves, hair up, even a real pair of shoes. Once I started moving bars around and seeing what was going on inside, though, I changed my plan. The bees are working that lump of comb, and have even built more on it from the ground up. Now, I know that's not optimal for honey harvest...in fact, it will be pretty tricky. But the bees get to keep most of their first year honey, in theory, so what do I care if they want it down there? Besides, the only way to get it out is to remove a lot of bars, including a great deal of brood comb. The one concern I have about leaving it there is varroa. I've read that one of the advantages of a top bar hive in combating varroa mites is that the comb doesn't touch the bottom or sides, thus leaving the mites no way to climb back up into the brood nest. We found a varroa mite last week. Just one. They are the size of seed ticks, so if you imagine finding a tick the size of a football on your back, you can get a picture of their size relative to the bees. No wonder they are so destructive.
Still, they are here, and bees and beeks alike need to learn to live with them. I'm studying up on how to prepare a sugar syrup with essential oils that people are using with good results. The bees feed this readily available syrup to the brood, then the mites attacking that brood die from the essential oils. Oils used include lemongrass, peppermint, and wintergreen.
We're learning that honeycomb is significantly thicker than brood comb--the cells seem too be roughly 3/4 inch deep, as opposed to about 1/2 inch. (Figures arrived at by eyeballing, not actually measuring.) So when we build more hives next month, I think we should make some wider bars, or at least cut some 1/4 inch spacers to insert between honey bearing combs. I think that will eliminate some of the cross comb issues we're seeing with Beedicca. Today, as a barefoot style tactic, I cut and pried the combs apart so each comb was attached to only one bar, and slipped in a stick of bamboo as a spacer. One comb was so fat I needed two sticks to give it enough room! (can't wait to harvest that puppy...) All of this meant I ended up removing two bars, so the hive now has a total of 24 bars, with the last 8 or so partly to mostly open for more comb.
I also re-engineered the roof, which is simply a bit of roofing tin. I originally folded ours down the center, so its peak ran lengthwise along the hive. In the early afternoon, the sun would beat down mercilessly on the south east side, driving the drones to cluster outside the hive in beards while the workers assumed the air conditioning position. According to what I've read, many workers abandon nectar duty, and instead arrange themselves in various patterns to control air flow through the hive, while other workers bring in water for evaporative cooling. I theorized that the peaked roof was conducting heat right down into the hive instead of helping to create airflow: probably the cause of that huge comb falling off its bar into the bottom of the hive where we now have to worry about it. I flattened out the tin and set it back up like a shed roof, with the southeast edge raised a few inches, so the hot sun won't have a flat surface to rain fire upon. I think the resulting overhang is enough to keep direct sun from hitting the top of the hive at all. In winter, we can reverse the slant so the sun will hit the flat of the roof and warm the hive.
I saw some new birds today: a flock of adorable woods pee-wees ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Wood_Pewee), and at long last, the elusive cat bird (http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Gray_Catbird/id ), which my guidebook describes as a "skulker." I've caught glimpses of this bird, skulking indeed, in the underbrush, nothing but a bird shaped shadow that vanishes when you look at it. This morning she landed on the dead cassia bush outside my bedroom window and I got a good look before she realized I was there.
The five surviving hens are doing well. They're getting used to their coop, and have started laying again. We let them out on days when we're home and can pay attention in the evenings. The babies are coming along well too, and I'll probably let the two new RIRs out of their chicken tractor sometime next month. The Old English bantams are still so tiny, I'm not sure I'll ever let them out! The three of them will have abundant room inside one of the moveable tractor coops, which are supposedly big enough for 5-8 normal sized hens to live comfortably.
Still no harvest on the tomatoes or peppers that I planted around the hive, but the potatoes are nearly ready to dig, the sweet potatoes are looking good, and there is one chili pepper, the Thai hot, which seems to be enjoying life in partial shade: it's not leggy at all, and has a lot of new fruits coming along. With June approaching, our inside season is almost upon us. I'm starting to look forward to getting a lot more writing done, now that the distractions of spring are waning.
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