Hey everone, WOW what can I say? What an incredible evening this was. We have not done a bee-rescue in ages, and it just so turns out, we did so this time around on our property, with our own bees in a Wine-Barrel of all places would you believe?
Why do I always start with the best pic first? Well with one this epic why not? This was the bees and combs that we hoisted up with a rop after we had cut the top part of the wine barrel out with a drill and jigsaw, but let's start from the beginning shall we?
This wine-barrel was sitting on the side of the garages for a month or two. To our dismay one morning a massive swarm of bees moved in. Never a problem for bee-keepers such as ourselves, but what to do? We left them! The idea was to let them establish themselves in this wine-barrel for some time get stronger, established, start breeding and then build some nice comprehensive combs, which as nature would have it, they did.
We always work bees with red lights at night. It is said that animals and insects cannot see red, in my opinion the jury is still out on that!
Our plan was once they had nicely established themselves to transfer them into a langstroth hive just before Winter, well now was the time, so sprung to action we did.
Firstly we screwed 6 screws into the top of the wine barrel and attached a rope to the screws to be hoisted up later. We then attached the rope to overhead beams and tied to the pickup truck in the background!
We then drilled a few holes in the top of the wine-barrel and in a circular motion with a jigsaw cut the top part off, rather challening indeed as the bees were not as co-operative, we administered some smoke and they calmed down.
Generally bees do not like loud noises, so it is never a good idea to use lawnmowers, jigsaws or loud machinery near them as we did here, unless of course you do so at night and administer smoke to calm them down!
Here we had just lifted the top part with attached combs up around 1.8 metres off the ground as to remove the bees and combs for re-installation into their new home later!
Once we had cut the top we gently hoisted this up, half the combs were attached to the side strangely enough and the other half to the lid. We then used our specially modified 'bee sucker' to gently suck them into a holding unit whilst we removed the combs from this wine-barrel and gently re-installed them into the langstroth hive brooder frames!
Here I cut these to size gently making sure not to harm the brood and then fastening with rubber bands.
Bees are incredibly smart little creatures, once they have re-attached their combs to the top and side of the wooden frames they simply cut the rubber bands an extract, YES REALLY, I have seen it with my own two eyes, Incredbible!
Above and below a few pictures of the bees dangling in mid-air, the bees were rather passive at this point from the smoke we had administered, after smoking they generally consume lots of honey as a survival mechanism and become calm, they generally then cluster together as they have here!
The residual smoke hanging around, after intial smoking generally best to only do so about every 15 minutes or so as to let them relax but also not over smoke as to dissallow them to breath!
This is quiet an interesting picture, the clear distinction between drone combs and worker bee combs. The Drone combs are generally more prevalent in Summer only, they are naturally about 3 times the size of the respective female worker bee, drones are literally just made to mate with the Queen they render no value other than that whatsoever .. lazy males :P
We cut the Drone combs out as they simply house 'threats' such as wax moth, hive beetles etc. These will be re-built by the bees come Summer again!
A very interesting Drone Bee read here as per wikipedia:
Drones carry only one type of allele at each chromosomal position, because they are haploid (containing only one set of chromosomes from the mother). During the development of eggs within a queen, a diploid cell with 32 chromosomes divides to generate haploid cells called gametes with 16 chromosomes. The result is a haploid egg, with chromosomes having a new combination of alleles at the various loci. This process is called arrhenotokous parthenogenesis or simply arrhenotoky.
Because the male bee technically has only a mother, and no father, its genealogical tree is unusual. The first generation has one member (the male). One generation back also has one member (the mother). Two generations back are two members (the mother and father of the mother). Three generations back are three members. Four back are five members. That is, the numbers in each generation going back are 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, ... – the Fibonacci sequence.[1]
Much debate and controversy exist in the scientific literature about the dynamics and apparent benefit of the combined forms of reproduction in honey bees and other social insects, known as the haplodiploid sex-determination system. The drones have two reproductive functions: Each drone grows from the queen's unfertilized haploid egg and produces some 10 million male sperm cells, each genetically identical to the egg. Drones also serve as a vehicle to mate with a new queen to fertilize her eggs. Female worker bees develop from fertilized eggs and are diploid in origin, which means that the sperm from a father provides a second set of 16 chromosomes for a total of 32: one set from each parent. Since all the sperm cells produced by a particular drone are genetically identical, full sisters are more closely related than full sisters of other animals where the sperm is not genetically identical.
A laying worker bee exclusively produces totally unfertilized eggs, which develop into drones. As an exception to this rule, laying worker bees in some subspecies of honey bees may also produce diploid (and therefore female) fertile offspring in a process called thelytoky, in which the second set of chromosomes comes not from sperm, but from one of the three polar bodies during anaphase II of meiosis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)
The (female or worker bee) nice read here as per wikipedia:
A worker bee is any female (eusocial) bee that lacks the full reproductive capacity of the colony's queen bee; under most circumstances, this is correlated to an increase in certain non-reproductive activities relative to a queen, as well. Worker bees occur in many bumble bee Bombus species other than honey bees, but this is by far the most familiar colloquial use of the term.
Workers gather pollen into the pollen baskets on their back legs and carry it back to the hive where it is used as food for the developing brood. Pollen carried on their bodies may be carried to another flower where a small portion can rub off onto the pistil, resulting in cross pollination. A significant amount of the world's food supply, particularly fruit, depends greatly on crop pollination by honey bees.[1] Nectar is sucked up through the proboscis, mixed with enzymes in the stomach, and carried back to the hive, where it is stored in wax cells and evaporated into honey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_bee
We always work bees at night, it is an 'insurance policy' as the Africanized Killer Bee can be rather unpredictable, for the safety of ourselves and everyone else we work with them at night, by the time the sun rises the next morning generally their 'bad mood' would have worn off.
Here they are the following day happy, transferred to their new home and carrying on as usual. We will 'super up' around September this year and probably be able to harvest at-least ten kgs of honey by Nov-Dec.
Nature the incredible.
Be sure to stay tuned for more of my bee-keeping adventures!
Love and Light, be blessed.
Cheer$:)
