Adventures in Beekeeping - Day 3

Not much happened today with the bees. Last night Erin and I checked the hives to make sure that the queens were alive. Thankfully they both were. However, we did notice one problem. The queen cages have a little hole for the queen to sneak out of, and that hole is usually covered with a piece of cork to prevent her from getting out. The problem is that I forgot to take the cork out. Usually what you do is take the cork out and put a marshmallow in its place. The queen's attendants (and other bees) then eventually eat the marshmallow and set her free. The idea is that it allows the hive to get used to their new queen who is a total foreigner in their hive. Had we not noticed the cork was still in the hole both of our queens would have died, which needless to say, could have really hurt our beekeeping endeavors. Everything worked out though and they are now locked in their cage with a marshmallow blocking the hole. We will check in a few days to see if the queens have been freed yet.

I haven't been able to do much else, but I did take another short video of orientation flights and took a few better pictures of the bees on some flowers. They particularly like these blue flowers we have on the side of our house. They were literally out there all day collecting pollen. You'll see that in the pictures below as well.  Enjoy!

 

Here are the pictures from today.

I like how you can see the lines in the wings.  You can also see the eyes pretty well too.  These flowers look like balloons or grapes from this perspective.

If you look at the bee's back leg you will see a glob of goo.  That is pollen.  Well, at least I think it is.  The bees have a little hook built into their leg called the "pollen basket" and they tuck collected pollen in there so they can get as much as possible.

Flying up to the flower.  I think these were all Italians, but honestly I'm not so sure.

This bee actually went to a flower other than the blue ones.  Thought it was cool how they crawl all the way in there.