Update on the Honeybees

The warming temperatures and blooming flowers all about have really gotten the bees working, well, as busy as a bee.  I let our cilantro go to flower in the garden because the bees really love it.  They are all over the cilantro flowers in the garden.

I don't know where this girl had been prior to stopping over in the cilantro patch, but take a look at her "pollen sac" on her legs.  They are filled with a reddish-purple pollen.  I don't know where that came from, but she's taking that back to the hive, but not before she collects some nectar or pollen from the cilantro.

The colony of bees that have resided in the column on our side porch left last week.  We think they swarmed.  We were very fortunate to have caught TWO swarms in the yard last week.  More on that in a moment.  In a swarm, the old queen generally leaves with half the bees.  The weird thing about that is that there was NO activity in or out of the column for several days.  Then all of a sudden... BOOM!  Bees repopulated the column!

For the two swarms we caught, we went to check on them the other day.  Here's Tricia in her bee suit about to open one of the boxes for inspection.  

The swarm is not a huge one, but they fill two or three frames and were buzzing away, very busy.

In my swarm trap, which is merely a deep box with 5 frames of old comb and foundation, the bees were already drawing out comb - not where I wanted it.  Time to get the remaining 5 frames in the box.  When bees swarm, they carry honey, wax, pollen, everything they need and when they find a new home, they get right to work.

If you look to the right center of the photo below, you can see that the queen has been busy.  Can you see the bee larva?  It is the little white worm looking thing curled up like the letter "c" in the cells.

Here's a photo of some younger larva in some fresh comb.

If there's larva, there's got to be a laying queen, and THERE she is!  Can you see her?  She's in the center left of the photo below with the long yellow tail.

So we have eggs and larva in both of the swarms we caught last week.  We have capped brood in two of our remaining four boxes of bees.  We're still waiting for a queen in both of the boxes that we split.  When we opened one of them, we did see two queen cells.  We'll check back in on them on Sunday and see if the splits were successful.  

If A Tree Falls In the Woods...

In what has become a biennial event, the red oak borer beetle has taken out another one of our oak trees.  It has been weakened for several years.  This spring it gave up the ghost.  It stands a skeleton of it's former glory.  The oak tree to the right of it was subservient to it, leaning over to gain some access to sunlight.  Now, perhaps, it will resume a more stately shape, until the borer beetle takes it out, too.

The dead tree once served as one side of the base of the zip line, or shoot to shoot, as we called it.  Our kids zipped down the cable many times, coming to an abrupt stop at the American flag on the barn.  I think that if the tree knew that the kids were counting on it to hold up the base of the zip line, it might have held out a few more years.  But the kids are grown and the big tree that served as the launching point of the zip line succumbed to the red oak borer beetle several years ago.  Time marches on.

I put off cutting down the tree as long as I possibly could.  However, big limbs started falling out of the tree and onto the barn.  A couple limbs arched precariously over the fence, threatening to fall on their grandchildren's trampoline.  I figured the neighborly thing to do was to take the old tree down.  I called a tree service from my hometown.  The proprietor's sister and I graduated from high school together.  He and his wife do this business on the side.  They came while I wasn't home one morning and put the tree on the ground for a price tag of $500.  I feel like that was a reasonable price.

Compare the photo above with the photo below.  It is a weight off my mind that the tree was felled.  There was really only one direction that it could go, and they put it on the ground in the prescribed location.  With the bucket truck and two chain saws running, it took them no time.  They did seek permission from my neighbor and they accessed the tree from my neighbor's back yard.

As we always request, the tree service laid the tree on the ground.  We'll cut it up ourselves and then I'll split it for firewood.  As the old saying goes, "Firewood warms you at least four times.  One to cut it down, Two to split it, Three to stack it, and Four to burn it."  We use a chainsaw rarely, so I always borrow my Dad's or on an occasion or two, I would rent one for $50 per day and would bring it back the same day.  The hardware store no longer rents them out, though.

Since it isn't very smart to buy a machine with a small engine that isn't used frequently, I was reading reviews for a battery-powered chainsaw.  This one had very good reviews, so I jumped on it.

It's an 80 volt chainsaw with an 18 inch bar.  When I paid the tree service for the work, I asked him his opinion of these saws.  I guess I should've asked before buying, but he told me that they use them in his line of work all the time.  He said you'll be tired out before the chainsaw loses its charge.  He told me as long as I kept the blade sharp and bar oil in the reservoir, the saw would make me proud.  I asked if the saw was too small to cut up the tree?  He told me no.  He said he cut the tree down with a smaller chain saw.

That's just what I needed to hear.  I'll be charging up the battery and will cut up the tree so that when cooler weather comes around in the fall, I can pull out my double-sided ax, wedge and sledgehammer and get busy splitting firewood for the winter.  As bad as I hated to see the tree go, we were smack-dab out of firewood.  And that reminds me, I need to call a chimneysweep.  We haven't had our chimney cleaned in several years.  It's almost laughable that I'm talking firewood and chimneysweeps when it is 107 outside!