Above: capped drone cells. The cells which have not been capped, mostly contain honey. The two frames of drone-comb, one taken from each hive, went home with the Junior Beekeeper and the Junior Beekeeper's Cousin to open, examine, salvage wax, and so on. Below, burr comb with honey scraped from the inner covers: yum!
Above: the Young Beekeeper slathers a layer of Crisco on a file-folder. This will be put just below the wire hive base, on the wooden hive base, to leave for several days, and remove, and we'll count the number of varroa mites which have fallen there, and got stuck in the Crisco, and this will give us a means of judging our varroa mite burden. We bought our bees from a great bee-keeper, and they've been beautifully bred and beautifully cared for, so we may not have many varroa mites. Bees are now bred for grooming behaviour, by which they remove mites from one another. Below: we're placing the Crisco-slathered file-folder.
Thank you, Mary Lynne, for taking our photos, all 60,003 of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment