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Newly planted persimmon and apple trees
A couple weeks ago I cleared an area to use as a small orchard. Yesterday I got around to planting six trees, including three persimmons and three apple variants. I've got room here for one or two more small trees, and I'm thinking about a couple cherries. All of these will provide the bees pollen and nectar, the bees will provide all of them with pollination, and the combo should provide us with more fruit than we can possibly eat.
Bees in defensive posture
When I cracked open the inner cover on this hive to feed them today, a lot of the bees threw their abdomens up and exposed their stings as a warning. It didn't take long for the warning to turn to action, and they started launching at me. Luckily I was wearing a veil, which spared me from numerous stings. This hive has been uncharacteristically defensive the last couple times I've been in it; hopefully it's not a sign of a failed queen. I don't want to pull frames to check for her right now due to the cold weather, so I'll do what I can to keep them fed and comfortable until I can get into the brood chamber next spring.
The beauty and complexity of apis mellifera
This girl was out on a landing board earlier today. I like how the complexity of her wings can be seen. It also got me thinking about whether we humans would have so much affection for honey bees if they weren't so hairy. It gives them a cute factor most other insects don't enjoy (caterpillars come to mind as another exception). I think the combination of hair and big, baby-like eyes gives them an edge in human goodwill over insects like scorpions or ants. And while that's good for bees, it's not so good for the level of effort we'll put into protecting other critters.
Black snake sunning itself
We had a black snake (Pantherophis obsoletus) catching some rays on a rock ledge. Black snakes are great for keeping mice and venomous snakes at bay, so I like to have them around. But that's not really the topic of today's post...
In the spring and summer, I'm always collecting data from my own hives and tweaking the Mite Calculator variables as needed. But the True Mite Load are not based on my own data, and are "sketchy" as I say on the main page. Today I edited the formula for the True Mite Load after coming across a University of Georgia Bee Lab study that showed an additional 1/3 of a colony's mites were present in the amount of capped brood that would equal about what you'd find in a deep hive body with a strong laying queen. (That's a mouthful.) Previous guesstimates I'd seen indicated this amount of capped brood would have about 1/3 the total mites in the hive. This sounds like semantics on the surface, but consider this: If you have a hive with 40,000 bees and a phoretic mite load of 3% (1200 phoretic mites), then an additional 1/3 (400 mites) would give you a total mite population of 1600 mites, or 4% true mite load. Meanwhile, if you figure the 1200 phoretic mites represents 2/3 of the total mite population, then you've got 1800 mites, or 4.5% true mite load. This difference is further exacerbated when adding the second brood chamber. So for now, I'm basing the True Mite Load calculation off the UofGA study. As I continue to learn and find new information, I'll refine or correct the numbers to reflect my best understanding of reality.
Last chance open feeding
It warmed up this week, so I gave the girls a little treat.
Here's a fun fact. Ball Corp, the namesake of the ubiquitous Ball mason jars like the one shown here, has an aerospace division that builds satellites. It makes sense if you think about it...during the early days of the space race, the US government needed companies with experience building components that could resist extreme temperature and pressure changes. Who better than a canning jar manufacturer? Ball has been making space exploration equipment ever since. One of their most famous contributions was the corrective lens that was installed on the Hubble Space Telescope, which effectively saved the program and led to decades of ground-breaking discoveries about our cosmos.