Separating bars always yields these awesome bee bridges
Beepocalypse – lesson learned
The fact that every comb built since the beginning had been so perfectly straight made me loose the habit of checking every frame. Horrible mistake, what started as a little bump in an early bar became more and more angled resulting in comb crossing bars. When I caught it, it was simply too late and a major operation had to be done to set things straight. Comb fell, deep cutting needed to be done & a ton of bees died in the process. I lost half of my honey production & half of my colony. There was just no easy way to do this.
The lesson learned here is to inspect often and all the bars, especially when the bees lay a lot of comb.
Some crossed comb, when things weren’t ugly enough that I was still taking pictures
Here are some tips to incentivize the bees to build straight:
- lay some wax in a line that you want them to follow (I had done that and it worked really well for a while)
- cut if they deviate, cut again until they stop
- keep the following board close to where the last comb is built because it is a straight reference, in other words, don’t expand to far from the comb.
- add an empty bar between the ones that had crooked comb
I’m not sure how these techniques work but I certainly am religiously following them now. Hopefully this will save us from another traumatic experience.
All in all this sucked and I feel really bad for failing my bees. I still got some 6 jars of honey out but I could have gotten a lot more. It’s the most delicious honey I ever had but every time I have some I am reminded of the beepocalypse.
Lesson learned…
It’s a freaking mass-grave in there
Got some decent comb out
Bee Baby Boom
The colony has been growing very dramatically in the past couple of weeks. All the brood I saw finally saw the light of day and the bees are now quickly filling their hive. All in all it took them a while to really get going. This is one of the disadvantages of top-bar beekeeping, the bees have to build everything by themselves so it takes the colony longer to establish itself. I think it’s a good thing, for one because it’s more natural but also because building comb is one less thing I need to do :).
Given that population growth is now in full swing, I gave them quite a few more top-bars to expand on. We are approaching the maximum size the hive will allow though as I would like to keep a few empty bars to have room for shifting and rotating. It may be time to start thinking about a second hive.
Bee population growth is not exponential, only 1 queen does all the laying although she can lay a few thousand eggs a day. So it’s linear and will probably turn asymptotic with older bees dying. I wonder how big a hive could get outside of its habitat limitations.
Turn on the sound and hear the hive’s rumble.
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The hive entrance is very busy.
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I wish I had a high speed camera.
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