Bee Diary - 2018-06-05

Tue 05 June 2018

It has been a couple of days since I had made it out to the hive. The weather has been quite rainy as of late and that makes the trail quite muddy. In my absence the girls seem to have been carrying on, doing their thing. Today I visited around 11AM and found a lot of comings and goings. Many of the arrivals had nectar sacs filled to flight capacity. I will likely wait another day or so to go in and make sure the queen is laying and that everything inside is doing what it should be doing.

Ants

The ants continue to be a nuisance under the lid but their numbers seem to be down from previous visits. I brought a paint brush with me, this time, to remove them and their larva without having them get on me and inflict revenge like last time. Hopefully this eviction will continue to reduce their numbers.

OSBeehives

A while back I downloaded the OSBeehives app in the hopes of using it to detect problems with the hive. It simply records the sound of the hive, uploads it to a server, analyses the sounds, and gives you an opinion. I don’t know how proven it is but it is another tool in the tool box…​

One problem I have with the application is the requirement that it have network connectivity while collecting the 15-second audio sample. My apiary seems to be in a cellular dead zone and is too far away from my home network to get a WiFi connection. I would love it if the program would just record the audio, hold it until I can get back to a network connection, and then process it, but no.

Today, the winds must have been blowing in the correct direction as I was able to get the weakest of 4G signals. Enough of a signal to grab the audio and send it into the ether. I received a report of "Healthy". I’ll continue to make these recordings and see how it pans out.

To Do

  1. Inspect the medium box (empty) for ants and evict them if seen.

    • Try cinnamon?

  2. Inspect brood box to make sure:

    • eggs are visible

    • everyone is happy

  3. Tilt the hive forward instead of back.

    • Need to get a small piece of wood to do this.

By Sparks, Category: Bees

Tags: Bee Diary /