Observation Hive, October 21, 2014

     I've noticed a few changes in the observation hive this past week.  First of all there has been a noticeable decrease in their honey stores. That is probably due to the fact that I failed to make up sugar syrup last week and the feeder ran dry for three days. I put a new jar of syrup in their feeder last Saturday.  The bees then took until Tuesday afternoon to consume one quart of sugar syrup.  A month ago I was having to change out the feeder bottle every other day so their appetite has diminished a little.  Obviously there isn't much in the way of nectar available here for the bees in mid October so maybe they need a little time to get back into nectar foraging mode.

    On the other hand, the bees have been bringing in lots of pollen.  I watched returning foragers this afternoon and a fairly high percentage of them were carrying pollen. The observation hive consists of  four deep frames stacked vertically.  the lower three frames were mainly devoted to brood in mid September. Now the middle two frames have only half the brood they did a month ago while the lower frame has no brood at all.  On the other hand the amount of pollen stored in that lower frame has steadily increased over the past two weeks. When I looked at it this morning it seemed that about half of the frame is currently devoted to pollen storage.

Two returning foragers loaded with pollen

       I will give you a little run down on how our observation hive is configured.  As I mentioned above, the observation hive itself consists of four vertical deep frames.  This is mounted onto a rotating base, which is in turn mounted on a deep hive body with ten frames.  The deep hive body serves as an overflow area as well as a route to the clear plastic tunnel leading to the feeder and the outside. I don't know how much the bees are using this lower area. Neither of the two earlier colonies which resided in the observation hive ever expanded into the deep hive body.  They never drew out the comb or stored anything it it. They merely transited through it in order to get to the outside. This hive body is mounted on a second deep hive body which is only used to house a clean out tray with a screen bottom and a wooden slide out tray. The clean out tray allows me to remove the dead bees from the hive so that the bees don't have to carry them up the clear plastic tube in order to give them a proper honeybee  funeral ceremony.  The wooden slide out device at the very bottom allows me to monitor the health of the colony by watching what debris falls onto it.  Beneath all of this is a metal framed dolly (the equivalent of a piano dolly on steroids).   A plastic tube exits the hive body and quickly reaches a T where one way leads to the outside while the other way leads to a feeding station. We replaced the upper part of the window with a piece of plywood painted black. There is a two inch diameter hole in the plywood and we have attached a front mount pollen trap which serves the bees as kind of a landing pad.

The Beez Neez Observation Hive

    We added a strip of hardware cloth which runs through the vertical section of the exit tube. That is a very important feature as without it, when ever a bee lost her footing she would cause a snowballing chain reaction of bees tumbling down the tube. The reason for the screened bottom clean out drawer is that the bees find it next to impossible to drag out the dead up the long vertical exit tube. The short video clip below shows the pollen trap we installed for a landing pad.

Our pollen trap landing pad.

   I usually have sheets of styrofoam insulation covering the glass panels of the observation hive to help the bees maintain that 22 degree temperature differential between the 70 degree ambient temperature of the inside of the store to the 92 degree temperature at which they incubate brood. I think one of the biggest problems maintaining bees in this particular observation hive is that there is so much exposed glass.