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

Filtering the loot

The loot

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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A sea of tomatoes

A few pics of all the tomatoes to come. Roughly 100 tomato plants, at 10lbs of tomatoes per plants, this means we’ll be doing some serious canning this year.

More cheapo frames – the tomato super-highway.

Flowers means we’ll be getting some yum-yum soon.

The plants that were planted the earliest of the season were given left-over scraps of wool in order to better retain heat & moisture. They are by far the most sturdy of all tomato plants. Lesson learned.

Look at ’em fancy plants, even I don’t wear such nice fiber.