The Bees Adopt Some Comb

Wow.  I am… ignorant.  Let’s just ignore the fact that Washington hive wanted nothing to do with that comb I left them.  You might recall that I reported on Adams hive cleaning out the chunks I left them.   What I didn’t have a chance to report was that I’d taken the big chunk from Washington and moved it to the top of the inner cover of Adams.  They seemed so much more enthusiastic, and I didn’t want to leave it sitting out for the neighborhood vermin.

This morning… as I went out to let the chickens out… I stopped to see this:

Hah! Attached! Ours!

You’ll see, if you look closely, that they have attached the comb to the front of the hive.  What’s more… they are going to town building it up.  These ladies have adopted the babies in the comb.  I neglected to freeze the comb to kill the brood (almost all drones).  Now, I’d freeze the little babies just to control mites (mites love drones), but my hives are so new, there’s not likely to be a significant number of mites yet.  So, I guess I just thought they’d dig them out and toss them while getting at the honey.

Nope.  They were proceeding to fix up the comb and make it part of their house.  One problem with that was that it covered the front entrance.  The other was… it was on the outside of the hive.  And they’re drones.  And… it’s just dumb.

Furthermore, they were doing the same thing with the piece that I put above the inner cover.  The thing was covered with bees all wanting desperately to raise some babies– drones or not.  Again… that would be OK if drones weren’t useless, and the comb wasn’t in the completely wrong place.  But they are.  And it was.

The punchline is that I had to move all the frames into a clean box, scrape off the comb again from both places, and put them in the freezer.  The bees were not stoked about my plan.  I’m getting a little tired of these awkward interactions.  Anyway, the state of the state is that my bees hate me now, but we’re going to work it out.  They’ll understand when they get a little older.

Still no eggs in Adams.  There are some supercedure cells going (by the by, still not sure what the internal differences are, but supercedure cells are up on the frame towards the top and swarm cells hang under the frames.)  I saw no swarm cells and at least two supercedure cells.  They’re capped… which leads me to believe that Her Highness should be popping out in the next coupla days.  And killing her sister.  Nice.

On a completely different topic… I managed to repair my irrigation system.  Most everything is on drip now.  I love that stuff.  No standing around with a hose sending half my water off into the atmosphere.  No splashing soil-borne diseases all over everything.  No forgetting to water something and discovering its dessicated corpse.  The programmable controller covers about 80% of the plants and the other stuff is on timers.

I’m still using a bit of soaker hose (since I had some new stuff here), but I’ll replace that with drip when it explodes, which it does, which I hate.  One of my neighbors referred to it as “hardening of the arteries”.

The other nice thing about drip is that it’s like tinker toys.  You can just goof plug anything you want to move, and there’s a whole bunch of drippers, bubblers, misters, and what-not to customize your coverage.  It’s a little bit of a pain to set up, since, with containers, you have to plumb each one, but once it’s set up… you’re golden.