Bad beekeeping

The latest in a long stream of posts avoiding more important matters. But you take what you can get, I think. This one is about my continuing wanderings in bee land.

DSC_5727-comb_crop

Some comb, as you'll doubtless recognise. Don't be too hard on the poor things, as the frames have been re-ordered as I was taking them off, which is why they don't fit together as you'd expect. The stuff off to the right is what they do when you don't give them frames to work on (who would be so careless as to fail to do that?). You can see the bee-space (1/4" I think) that they like to give themselves, and the maximum thickness they will make. But you can also see how prettily they construct space-filling patterns. It reminds me of zebra stripes or somesuch. Of the others, only the fat one near the middle is good, the others are all lopsided or too think. But then, I often put them in like that - it has been a long time since they have had a clean set of frames to work from. This time I needed to melt a lot down - lots of rape honey from the spring set in the combs, that I didn't deal with at the time - so maybe next year they will have a better chance.

I see this photo was taken on 9/13, which is when I took the honey off and put the bayvarol in. Or thereabouts. So today is about 6 weeks on, which is happily when I was supposed to take the bayvarol out, and indeed I did. So that was good.

This has been quite a good season. Lots of honey in springtime and (unlike last year) plenty in autumn too. I really should have done all this taking off about a month earlier, but summer is always busy.

Refs

* 2010/06
* 2010/05

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By Richard C (not verified) on 31 Oct 2010 #permalink