A Window on Bees

Due to the hectic last few weeks of starting a new job with traveling and more, along with putting on a brisket bowling team party and attending two more bowling team events, I have neglected to write about Die Manchmal Gruene Weide of late. However, lack of writing doesn't mean neglect of Die Weide. Every weekend I head out there to water the garden and feed and water Herbie, Inge's donkey.

Busy Bees entering the home holes.

I've also visited and examined the bee hive every weekend and so far everything looks good. I have two holes opened for the bees which they stream in and out of continuously. However, we have noticed that they have a lot of entrances along the side as shown in the photo below. I inserted ridges on the top bars to hopefully guide the bees to build straight comb. Our only bar removal inspection, one week after they moved in and shown in a video two blog entries ago, shows that we still have straight comb. But the grooves I created for the comb building extend out the side of the bars and it appears the bees have found these suitable as entrances to the hives as shown below. I worry that these entrances may promote robbing and I am considering closing them off some how.

Inadvertent Top Bar Hive Bee Entrances.

 Below I realized that I could take a photo of the bee combs through the plexiglass observation port I built into the hive. At two weeks there are seven combs of which four can be seen here.

Through the Looking Glass - Bee Combs at 2 weeks.

I inspected the wood grain of the top bars of the two photos which indicates that the number of combs is the same but the size of each has grown.

Bee Combs at 3 weeks

Every week for the last three weeks we have harvested goods from the Weide Garden. This bag contains tomatoes, pickling cucumbers, and green beans. Inge made her first pickles from these and they came out better than we could have imagined. We brought a jar of thick-sliced pickles to Craig's pool party and the jar was quickly emptied as they tasted so good. 

Bag O' Garden Bounty

I didn't take a bee hive photo this weekend but we did take a walk through the woods to look at our trail cam. Unfortunately, this is the season of sticker seeds and they pasted my legs with uncomfortable stickies. Quite annoying!

Annoying Seasonal Stickers