Recovery

We had another bear attack a few weeks ago, this one on the two hives in our own yard.  Eric did his best to slap the hives back together, and then I picked up queen cells form a local master beekeeper, to help the hives recover with strong, new queens.

This afternoon, after face painting and balloon twisting in Ramsey, Eric and I finally had a non-rainy, fairly sunny-ish day to check on the bees!  Miracle of miracles!

So we took advantage of the opportunity and checked to see what was doing.

In the first photo, you can see a big empty space in the hive, which the bees are filling in with honeycomb.  Bees don't like spaces, and fill it - the larger ones with comb, the smaller ones with propolis.  This space was caused by the mess Eric faced when he put the hives back together post-attack, and he wasn't able to get all ten frames in there.  We're really going to have to figure out what to do about that, but right now, we're happy to let them have it so we don't kill the pupae in there and diminish their impending population.  In that photo, you can also see the very top of the queen cell that Eric installed, that green plastic cap is what it's attached to.  In the second photo is the bottom view of the same queen cell, with a nice round hole.  The queen hatched out, and hopefully is prepping for mating or is working on mating. 

We question what's going on a bit, because although we saw brood, we also saw a LOT of queen cells on that hive, built by the colony's workers themselves.  They're sealed and not hatched yet.  You can see them in the third photo - the ones hanging down looking like peanuts.  The bees build them out and down like that because queen bees need to grow bigger than workers, and will need that space.

In photo 4, you can see capped over honeycomb cells, which contain worker pupae.  We can tell by the way the caps look.  They're tan, rather than white (which would contain honey), and flat, rather than bumps (which would contain drones).  In the open cells, you can also see larvae, white worm-like bee babies.  The ones that pretty much fill their cells are obviously older than the ones that have smaller larvae set farther in.

Happily, in one of the photos, I also got a really nice shot of a drone, photo 5.  Those are the male bees, identifiable by their rounder, fatter abdomens (not really visible in the photo), and also their HUGE eyes, which are visible.  Aren't they crazy?

The sixth and seventh photos are just great shots of larvae and capped worker brood, in which pupae are busy growing, respectively.

And the eighth and ninth photos are photos of foragers coming on back home.  You can see the bright yellow pollen packed onto their back legs, and if you look closely, you can see one with red pollen.  I'd love to know what flora that's from!

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I was being a bit of a brute, and took two stings to my upper, inner thigh through my jeans.  I'm glad to have the first ones over with, and with some apple cider vinegar topically and a dose of prednisone, I'm absolutely fine.

The end result?  Both hives look good, and we added honey supers, hoping that they give us a crop this year.  The resource hive that Eric used to make a small colony looks amazing, so we put on a second level.  And since we had so many more frames with queen cells (more than the one in the photo here), we took a few to try more colonies in two more resource hives.  Theoretically, we could have five hives by the end of the season.  That would be nice after all the losses!

She Got Me

Yesterday afternoon, although it was still grey and cloudy, it finally stopped raining, so we decided to take a look into the honey supers on the Wonderland and Pooh hives to see if they needed any more space.  Turns out they didn't, but they're doing well with the space they've got.

But I got my first sting in 35 years, my first sting since becoming a beekeeper.  Totally my fault, too.

I was dressed in a dark, short-sleeved shirt and nice pants, and I wasn't in the mood to take part in going into the hives, as I'd just gotten back from a 3-hour face painting gig, so I was across the yard while Eric donned his gear to take a look.

Well, me being me, I got curious and wanted to see too, so I got closer and closer.  Eric took the top super off the Pooh hive, put it on the ground, and was looking at honey frames in the second super, as I got closer to have a look at the top super, which was now uncovered, wide open, on the ground.  I stood right next to it, leaning over to look in from the top, for all intents and purposes, looking to the bees like a big ol' looming bear about to attack (to a bee, dark clothes a human looks like a potential bear, and therefore a huge threat) their indefensible hive.

Whoops.

I felt her land in the crook of my elbow, realized I'd scared them, and immediately walked away from the hives, not freaking out (kudos to me!) not swatting at her, trying to shake my arm to shake her off, but it was already too late.  I felt the pinch as she stung me, and immediately scraped out the stinger, which is what you want to do if you're ever stung, FYI.  It was weird, then.  I felt a gradual, but quick heat start to build, and I knew it was going to hurt.  Not deathly, not intolerably, but it definitely hurt.  I got an ice pack from the freezer, which immediately numbed the pain, and kept it on until the pain subsided on its own.

Later last night, while I was knitting, I was fine.  Every time I straightened my elbow all the way, it felt sore, but not bad.  That's mostly gone now.  What I'm left with is a crazy amount of itching, that's driving me a tad insane, but I'll live.  And for the record, that Benadryl topical anti-itch stuff?  It's useless.  Just so you know.

I'm actually glad it happened.  I'm sorry I scared them, and I'm sorry one of the girls felt the need to go kamikaze, but I'm glad I got stung.  It's good to know that it hurts no more than I remember it hurting 35 years ago, and I've proven to myself that I can handle it fine.  So I'm good!