Day 12 & 13: Bees in the Trees

Day 12:

Started with a morning straight to the bees. We went through a few and had to split the larger hives into two because they were there was not enough space for the worker bees to be efficient. Because each hive only has 1 queen, this means one of the hives will be queenless. The queenless hive will take notice and within days the worker bees will feed one of their eggs royal jelly, thus making it a queen cell.

After breakfast, Agape had 3 friends over who were full of questions about beekeeping. As soon they they were helped we ready ready to go to the hives. On the way out, Kwao received a phone call from a distressed neighbor whose bees had 'swarmed' to a nearby tree (this is when bees do not have enough space in their hive and take off together into a new location). We stopped by her house on the way to the hives and quickly saw the bundle of maybe a thousand bees hanging from a branch in a mango tree. The other intern and myself held an empty hive directly under the branch and Kwao gave the branch a strong shake. Rather simply, all the bees fell into the bottom of the hive, and we quickly had to cover it with top bars so they wouldn't fly out. Her bees had swarmed from a small hive into a tree, and we moved them from the tree into a larger hive for her.

We then went to the original apiary we were heading towards and collected two buckets of honey comb. Once back at the house, I was assigned with taking the bees out of one of the buckets. There were  good 30-40 bees still in the bucket. The trick is to grab them by the wing and throw them far as possible before they attempt to fly back.

Before dinner, we went on a hike with the dogs to a new location. It was a rather deep swimming hole with a large rope swing. I will definitely be returning here when there is more time for a swim. Instead of taking the traditional route back, we were led coast side of the island until we ended up back at our beach.

Day 13:

My swellings were finally going away just in time for more stings. After breakfast we drove to the same apiary as yesterday and collected a bucket of honeycomb. We split a couple more hives and needed to travel to another apiary to pick up top bars. While out we stopped by the Jack Fruit Tree and harvested 3 fruits. Yesterday was also Kwao's birthday, so there was much pie still to be eaten.

Today was a relaxing day and I spent much of it soaking bee stings and bug bites in the seawater.