I sneaked out of work an hour early yesterday to take advantage of a sunny afternoon and do a quick hive inspection.
Time: 4:30pm
Weather: Sunny, 52 degrees, no wind
Hives 1 through 5 are shown in order in the photo strip below.
Hive 1: Continues to prosper. However, I noticed excessive moisture along the inner cover, so I propped open the cover slightly to provide a little more circulation.
Hive 2: The population continues to dwindle. Found the queen on frame 7–she still has the red mark on her head from last year–and enough food that I shouldn’t have to feed this hive.
Hive 3: Lots of bees and very little food that I could find. So I added a feeder this morning with two quarts of sugar syrup mixed at 1:1. This will no doubt stimulate the queen to begin laying, and with the maple bloom just a month away, that might not be such a bad thing.
Hive 4: A few bees and lots of food. Not much to report here.
Hive 5: This a remnant of a swarm I collected last July, and surprisingly it’s still going strong. I’ve been feeding it off and on for the last month and I can already see capped brood on the middle frames. These bees are in a single deep–in couple of weeks I’ll add a second deep and continue to feed.
NASA’s HoneyBeeNet
I came across one of the most interesting–and unlikely–websites that I’ve seen in a long time–HoneyBeeNet. It’s produced by the Goddard Space Flight Center with the aim of better understanding climate change, including plant-pollinator interactions. One of the many neat things I found on the site was the Honey Bee Forage Map. Just click on your state and it will list blooming periods for major plant species.
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Why is NASA’s web page for ‘New Horizons’ shut down?
Since the launch of ‘New Horizons’, the unmanned space probe to the planet Pluto on 1-20-06 I have been following the mission on a daily basis.
I type ‘New Horizons–NASA’ on the search line, bring up the web site that displays the mission clocks. Click on the blue line that reads: ‘Find Out More’ under the heading in the lefthand corner that reads: Where Is The New Horizons Spacecraft Now?’