Week 18 #2. Goodbye, Marge. I’ll miss your honey, but not your stings.
One of the backyard beehives Africanized itself, so Karl got a lesson in packing up a beehive full of thousands of very, very angry bees for transport.
Fun fact: The best time to move a beehive is at night, which is also the time when successful bee rustlers go to work.
Week 16 #1. The first beehive checkup of the year ended on an unexpectedly painful note.
Week 7 #2. Kauai doesn’t have Varroa mites or small hive beetles. It’s pretty close to being beekeeping utopia.
Day 316. We admired Queen Knives’s egg-laying pattern. (The eggs are those little white bars in the center of each cell of comb in the center-right portion of the photo. A good queen will consistently fill adjacent cells with a single egg as shown here; a not-so-good one will scatter eggs -sometimes more than one per cell- willy-nilly over the frame. You can see some larger larvae towards the bottom left of the photo.)
Day 309. Apparently Knives’s hive (formerly Ramona’s, as commemorated by the Knives v. Ramona smackdown-themed super) really, really likes pollen.
Day 197. Putting honey at the hive entrance just before opening the hive supposedly distracts the bees so that they’ll be less, um, annoyed when you start checking the frames. Alas, Karl didn’t see any significant reduction in bee aggression when he tried it. On the other hand, it looked pretty neat.
Day 193. The newest beehive, which features (featured?) Queen Ramona, who may be in the process of being deposed by potential Queen Knives. G. and I decorated each super with a different evil ex, and Karl’s installing them in story order.
