The Buzz

Spilled Honey and Bee Tongues:

This morning I brought Nefertiti's hive a new super full of foundation with the single frame we'd pulled off of Nefertiti and harvested. It was still covered in honey, which they'll use while they are building out the comb in the new super.

Good deal.

I had a cookie sheet that the frame was sitting on for the past few days and it was covered in honey, so I took it and put it upside down on top of the super full of foundation so that the honey would drip down into the super before I gave it to the bees - having that honey smell will encourage them to get on that foundation and start licking and working away. I hope.

Since I don't want my Queen chimneying up the supers I put a Queen excluder below the new super. Ordinarily this would discourage the worker bees from that super as well as the Queen but the honey smell of that one frame and the honey I dripped onto the super ought to lure them up through.

The girls found the table where I'd put the super down to let the honey drip onto it by this afternoon. They are all over it, lapping up the honey with their funny bee tongues now.

There's quite a bit of honey on the ground underneath the table also, which is funny because the bees feeding under there are getting honey dripped on them. Then they must spend long minutes perched someplace cleaning themselves off, or asking a buddy to do it for them.

This young lady was doing a little dance while she tried to clean honey off her thorax...up and down, up and down...

Covered in Honey

Next bee post will be about the workers and what their jobs are within and without the hive...