Woke up to a delicious meal of banana fritters and cabbage. Not sure if I will continue this healthy vegan lifestyle once I'm back in the states, or fall back into a meat-loving animal once I'm back home.
After breakfast we suited up and went out to the hives. Today our goal was to check all the hives and make sure a queen was present. Queen are the only bees in the colony that will lay eggs, so no queen means no new bees for that hive. We alternated between using the smoker and recording notes, so we could keep track of the status of each hive. The Top Bar Hives were a variety of shapes. Mainly boxes and trapezoids. Trapezoids were much easier to manage, as you could push the bees in any direction you wanted. Squares however were a mess and all of the bees would be flying around at once. While using the smoker to attempt and reduce stings, received sting #4.
One of the beehives was overflowing with activity. So we were to migrate them from their 2ft hive into a 4ft hive. I was in charge of the migration, and each comb had to be moved separately. There were about 15 combs, each with a few hundred bees on them. As the clouds came in, the bees were roweled up, and sting numero 5 happened. This is probably the point where I will start losing count.
Afterwards we went to the hardware store. Not your ordinary American home depot styled place. We purchased cutlasses so we could clear out an area on the property to create another apiary. The cutlasses come dull, so we also needed to file them in order to make them sharp. This is actually much more difficult than I expected.
To end the night we picked fruits and made a tea out of them to wind-down a bit after a long day.
guessing the goldenseal diet didn't werk?
ReplyDeleteWho knows, maybe it would have been twice as bad without it lol
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