On Easter Sunday we got a call about a big swarm of bees in our neighborhood. The woman who called has a couple of hives in her backyard, one of which had swarmed three weeks earlier. We caught that swarm and installed it into our Green hive at our house. This time it was her other…
Tag: bees
Long live the queen!
This afternoon we inspected our Purple hive to check on how the queen is doing and see if they need more space for either brood or honey. For the past few weeks I’ve been able to smell that they’re making some very tasty honey (it smells like buttered popcorn) and we want to make sure that…
Going, going, gone!
Our Purple beehive, which swarmed on Wednesday (today is Friday), threw another swarm this afternoon. It remains to be seen if we can recapture them. So far we haven’t been able to see exactly where they’ve settled. Fingers crossed.
Swarmy weather
For the past week we’ve had rain, sometimes brief downpours and at other times more gentle rain, and the rainy days would be interspersed with sunshine. We were warned by one of our beekeeping mentors that this was “swarmy” weather: The bees are locked up inside the hive when it rains, and swarm on the…
Zombeeees!
Just in time for Hallowe’en! I have photographic evidence that some of our bees have been taken over by parasitic phorid flies. These flies are a group of diverse animals, including wasps and nematode worms, described as “parasitoids.” These are not your average parasites, which generally do not cause lethal damage to their host, although as…
The mother of all allergic reactions
Yesterday I went in for my allergy shots. I’ve been doing this immunotherapy for several years now, after innumerable yearly bouts of debilitating bronchitis that lasts for 6-8 weeks. Silly me. If I had done the allergy shots back in my 20s, I wouldn’t have had to suffer all these years. My allergy scratch test…