Meandering on Monday Afternoon

“How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.” – Psalm 104:24

Lots of work on the computer today, sitting inside staring into a computer monitor.  Once I finished up work today it was time to get outside, touch the grass, and observe real things that are going on in the world right outside your door.  It's easy in modern society to live in monasteries of our own making and wall ourselves off from the real world.  What a tragedy!

Growing up, I watched a television program called Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.  The host, Marlin Perkins and the co-host, Jim Fowler, would wrestle anacondas and watch cheetah's chase down antelope.  I always enjoyed that show.  You know what?  There is a wild kingdom in your backyard.  Maybe we won't run into a rhinoceros or a crocodile, but who knows?  Let's take a walk and see what kind of adventures we can stumble upon in the great outdoors. 

In the back pasture, in what we call "the bull pen," because we quarantine the bull in there away from the cows until they come in heat, we have a water trough.  The bull (we call him Nicky) slowly drinks water from the trough on hot afternoons.  He's not the only one drinking water there, though.  Check out the honeybees that line the edges of the trough, drinking water.

The water trough is about 50 yards from the bee boxes.  If you stand at the trough and look back to the bee boxes, you can see a... beeline of bees.  It is a steady stream of honeybees back and forth, back and forth.  Sometimes some of the bees get clumsy or get knocked into the water.  Look at the poor girl below.  She's fallen in and she beats her little wings, making ripples in the water trying to get out.  Sometimes I'll use a leaf to scoop the bees up and rescue them like a lifeguard would throw a flotation device.

Why are bees drinking water?  Well, they need water like you and I do for hydration.  But on hot days like today when the heat index makes it feel like it is 105 degrees, the bees use the water to regulate the temperature in the hive.  The bees like the hive to stay between 91 - 97 degrees.  If it gets hotter than this, the wax could melt.  The way they cool the hive is that they carry the water back to the hive, spit the water on the comb and then beat their wings.  The honeybees create their own air conditioning!  On hot days like today, the bees will congregate on the outside of the hive.  Just look at them.

While we're looking at the bees, I went inside and put my bee suit on.  I pulled the telescoping lid of the top of each of the four boxes and placed a Swiffer sheet on the very top then put the lid back on.  There is a pest called a small hive beetle (SHB) that cause problems in hives.  If you have healthy hives, the bees are able to take care of the problem.  They'll round up the small hive beetles and send them up to the top of the box.

Here's where the Swiffer sheets come in.  They're used a a trap.  When the honeybees chase the small hive beetles to the top of the box.  When the hive beetles walk across the Swiffer sheets, they get their feet stuck on the microscopic loops in the Swiffer sheets.  It's kind of like Velcro.  The beetles have barbs on their legs that get tangled in the Swiffer by tiny microscopic loops on the sheets.  I opened up the boxes and placed a Swiffer sheet on top of each box.

We'll check back in aa number of weeks and let you know if our small hive beetle traps (Swiffer sheets)
were successful.