Bee update

Went down to the ranch yesterday afternoon to check on the newly installed bee packages.  When you order a package of bees, they come in a screen box the size of a shoe box.  Inside the box all of the worker bees are crawling around in a big cluster.  In the center of the cluster is a smaller screen cage the size of a D cell battery with a queen in it.  They are separated at this point because the bees are not familiar with the queen and are under stress.  In such a scenario the bees could very easily regard her as an intruder and kill her.  When you install the bees in the hive, you open the package, and shake the bees out of the package so they fall into the hive.  You then hang the queen cage from one of the top bars, close up the hive, and leave them alone for a few days.  There is a piece of sugar candy plugging a hole at one end of the queen's cage, which the bees will eat until its gone.  The hope is that by the time they've eaten through the candy they will have grown accustom to her and accepted her as their queen.  Once the queen is out of the cage, it's important to remove the queen cage from the hive or the bees could start building comb on the cage that is oriented in the wrong direction.

My trip down to the ranch yesterday was to check if the queens had left their cages and, if so, to remove the cages.  Two of the hive appeared to have had successfully integrated their queens, so I removed those cages.  A third hive still had a queen in the cage because the candy hadn't been fully consumed, so I put it back in the hive.  The forth cage had a dead queen in it, which was quite disappointing because I had already had one dead queen in the bee package I tried to install in my back yard the day before.  The queen in the package from the day before had been dead on arrival, but this queen appeared to have been killed by the bees in the hive. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Front-end loader mounted t-post installer

Image
 Since we started fencing the perimeter of our ranch in 2014, I've strove to increase the rate at which I am able to fence an area.  Among the most recent improvements has been a t-post pusher which is mounted to our tractor's front-end loader bucket.  This device is very simple, but has already saved us countless hours of work. The following photographs illustrate how I use the post pusher.  Aiming: The loader is first positioned with the end of the pusher is close to the ground.  I then maneuver the tractor until the end of the pusher is in alignment with the marked post location.  This is how the lined up pusher looks from the driver's seat of the tractor.  Yes, I know the loader has an issue with the hydraulics cover. Loading:  Once the pusher is aligned, I place the tractor in park, raise the loader arm and insert a t-post into the open end of the pusher.  Tilting:  Correct placement of the t-post is dependent aligning the post along three axises,
Read more

DIY cultipacker-roller

Image
For those of you who are unfamiliar with agricultural equipment, a cultipacker is an implement used to compress soil.  There are several reasons a farmer may use a cultipacker, but, for me, the primary purpose for the cultipacker is to pack down soil that has just been planted with grass seed.  This should greatly improve seed germination in newly planted bison pasture. Five truck tire rims welded together form the shape of the cultipacker.  Technically this is really more of a cultipacker-roller hybrid as the ridged portions on the roller should be more closely spaced on a true cultipacker.  A thick piece of steel tube runs through the center of the rims, which I'll explain later in this post. For added weight each tire rim was filled with concrete after it was welded in place.  A photograph of the roller portion of the cultipacker completed and waiting for the concrete to cure.  The length of steel tube that runs through the center of the roller is welded to the
Read more

Face fly nightmare

Image
Face flies beginning to appear a few days after my initial treatment with AiM-L VetCaps.  I unfortunately don't have any photos of the original mob of flies, which was much worse. Since the forth of July an insect called the face fly ( Musca autumnalis ) has plagued our ranch and caused me a considerable amount of stress.  It was a week ago, on the forth, while doing a routine check on the herd, that I noticed that the bison appeared to be greatly agitated by a surprisingly high number of the flies.  While the sight of flies or other small insects buzzing around grazing animals is nothing unusual, this was something different.  The flies flocked in groups around the eyes and nose of each animal so incessantly that the bisons' natural defenses appeared to be ineffective.  All the blinking, ear flapping, tail wagging, snorting, rolling in soil, and rubbing on trees had little effect.  No matter how many times they did these things the flies would just briefly fly up into the
Read more