Listening to the bees
As I said before, the scale of how things are done in commercial beekeeping is amazing, and dramatically different than for backyard or even sideliner beekeepers. When you have 900 colonies that are over-flowing with honey and bees and need to be split, sometimes you just split them 50/50 without really looking at what goes where. This means that in 1800 colonies, you need to figure out who has a queen and who doesn't, if you don't have 1800 queens. Also, when you have been in a bee yard multiple days in a row, making the bees very irritated. However, what we did today was listening to the bees. Even in a yard full of unhappy bees, you can pop the top, and the bees will tell you if they have a queen or not. We were working in teams today, and my team of 3 agreed almost 100% about who needed a queen cell, and who was fine. It was a really nice day. We also supered a whole lot of colonies that needed more room, and did about 80 more splits.The desert is amazing at this time of year. The bloom is so amazing that in a yard with 45-100 pallets of bees (up to 400 colonies) the bees are still making honey to beat the band, faster than we can keep up. It is so beautiful, unbelievable. The honey is water white, and so good, unlike any other honey, of course.
I promised you the tips for directing bees. A trick for getting a swarm of bees to go in a hive body is to tap on the side of the box. He showed me, and sure enough, the bees walked right in. And since these bees get a little fiesty after being worked multiple days, we each get in the truck with 300 bees around our heads, 3 people equals 900 bees in the truck. If you wiggle your fingers while slowly waving the bees out the door, they tend to follow your hand. I have tried it in the bee yards, too, and you can almost dance with the bees, like the girl in Jupiter Rising, though not quite as perfectly organized as things go in the movies. I'll be driving home tomorrow night, and get started with the mentoring system when I get home. I have lots to share, too, and really looking forward to it. T
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