Bull City Bees Beekeeping adventures in downtown Durham

One of the things that you’re supposed to do when you first install a new colony in the hive is to feed the colony until it is “established”.  How long does that take?  Well, it depends.  Jill and I fed the bees for a few weeks until we saw that a) they weren’t taking the syrup and b) the workers were returning to the hive with pollen in their pollen baskets.

In North Carolina, you are also supposed to start feeding the colony in the heat of summer when there aren’t as many plants blooming.  So for the past few weeks… or is it months… wait when was the last time… anyway, we’ve taken to feeding the bees again.  One of the questions I have is just how much syrup are they going through.  So consider this a marker, or maybe just a note to myself, I just fed Miss Coco Peru [have I mentioned that our naming scheme is based on the stage name of drag queens?] 10# of 1:1 syrup.  Or about 5# of sugar to 5# of water.

I’ll try to check back every day for the next few to get a sense of how fast the colony is consuming the syrup.

I grew up in Louisiana and I know hot weather, and well, it’s been hot here in Durham.  I mean really hot.  8:30pm and it’s still over 32 degrees (C), hot. It’s so hot that the bees have taken to a rather freakish behavior… bearding.  In a nutshell, after all the workers return home from their foraging, they decide not to go inside.  Instead, they hang out on the front porch.  No word on whether or not they are sipping mint juleps.  From what we could tell this morning, they probably wound up bearding all the way to the top of the hive box.  Fortunately, the bearding doesn’t imply that they’re about to swarm, but I can say that the bees that look so cute individually are slightly terrifying en masse.

(the picture’s a touch blurry, but the sun was going down and it was an iPhone… we do what we can)

Who are you? One of the freaks?!  (nb: the link is not “Jill-approved”, but it goes through my head every time I see the bees beard)