Rescued this girl from drowning in the water bowl today. As you can see, she was a bit water-logged and was taking some time to dry herself out before going right back to work! 🐝🍯🐝🍯
Absolutely gorgeous day today! The ladies are working so hard! Without the minor tweaks from us humans helping them out, they can definitely handle their own…. As you can see in this video, the dead bees are dragged out to the entrance by the workers so they don’t spread disease or take up space.
*Disclaimer: We will wait till dusk to remove them because right now will make them incredibly angry 😉
Happy Thanksgiving to all! We are very thankful for these warm, beautiful days and healthy hives! In northern Nevada, the nights in the 20s and days in the 50s, it is very difficult to keep the ladies happy.. They are doing very well though and are out foraging the days away 🐝🍯🐝🍯
We had record breaking rainfall over the last few days so the ladies were being hermits in the hive. Now that the weather is back to normal sunny Nevada , they are eating like it’s literally their job. And they were NOT happy with me being in their faces 🐝🍯🐝🍯
Dinnertime!
With winter quickly approaching in northern Nevada, the ladies are trying to store up as much food as possible. No flowers means no nectar so we feed them a 2:1 sugar syrup to keep them happy. Once they decide they’ve had enough, they will stop eating, but right now they are going through a quart a day!
🐝🍯🐝🍯
After the hard work of extraction and allowing the raw honey to settle, here is the moment we’ve all been waiting for 🥳🍯🐝
While observing the bees on the mint flowers today, I found something a bit troubling…
This is a varroa mite on the back of this girl. Varroa mites are the most common parasite to honey bees and they can infest and ruin an entire hive if not treated for quickly.
While we cannot 100% guarantee that this is one of our bees, we have no choice but to test for them and treat if necessary.
Tomorrow we will do an alcohol wash to see what the mite count is. This test will kill about 300 bees, but is much better than possibly losing an entire colony.
Bees are obviously not big fans of smoke, so all of this wildfire smoke in the valley has them a bit aggravated and confused. But as you can see here, the ladies are still busy bringing in that pollen and nectar, as the other workers “fan” at the entrance to keep it cool inside….🐝🍯🐝🍯
