Day #434 A Silly Mistake

Last April, ten days after my bees arrived, I decided to keep a log of what appeared to be their reactions to the weather. I wasn’t very consistent with it. In fact, after a while I forgot all about it.

But I pulled up the document this morning, thinking it was something else. What an eye-opener. My very first entry was this:

4/27/11:

Tornados/hail predicted.

Morning clear. Bees normal.

4:15 pm Cloudy. Wind picked up. Countless bees swirling around entrance hole and hive, as if every forager wanted to get back inside at the same time. Both hives exhibited this behavior.

Bad thunderstorms and wind after midnight. No storm activity in afternoon, though.

When I read it, I saw right away what had happened. On April 27^th, I’d seen a hatch-out. I was a beginning beekeeper, though, and I didn’t know a hatch-out when I saw one. There had obviously been a disturbance in the hive more than three weeks before that day, some event that temporarily stopped the queen from laying. Then, 21 days before all that activity I saw, the queen had resumed her egg-laying. You might remember that it takes 21 days for a bee to go from egg to hatching.

I thought about it, and remembered that there had been evidence of tornado damage when I drove to South Georgia to pick up my bees on April 17^th. In fact, a tornado had ripped out part of the bee yard, and the folks there were still rebuilding the shed where they constructed their hives.

So this morning I Googled “georgia tornado march 2011” and found that a series of tornados had ripped through the state between the 18^th and the 27^th of March. I’m guessing, of course, but it seems logical that a tornado passing by a hive would be ample reason for a queen to shut down, at least temporarily. She must have felt more secure, though, by April 6^th, in order to lay the batch of eggs that all hatched on the 27^th and sent me into a flurry of concern.

I hadn’t seen any such activity in the 10 days I’d had the hives on my back deck, simply because there weren’t any babies ready to hatch yet.

Just goes to show you, there’s always something new to learn.

BEEattitude for Day #434:

       Blessed are those who pay attention to the world around them, for they shall see amazing sights.

p.s. from Fran -- blessed are those who pour over old documents, for they shall be pleasantly surprised.

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Day #332 Hatch-Out

Look what happens when a whole slew of baby bees all hatch out on the same day:

On Tuesday I happened to look out the bay window and was, quite frankly terrified, thinking that something awful had happened to my bees. There were thousands of them boiling out of the entrance holes and circling the hives – both hives.

I called my mentor, Tommy Bailey, in a panic, but he calmly informed me that since I’d started giving them sugar water three or so weeks ago, the first eggs were all hatching right about now. Remember? the bees were starving and the queens weren't laying any eggs -- until I started feeding them.






I blogged about feeding them sugar water on Day #311 (Friday, August 19^th). The queen probably started laying a few eggs at that time, but she really went into production five days later on August 24^th. How do I know that? Well, as I explained in blog # 209, there’s a 3-6-12 rule in beekeeping.

3+6+12=21.

·         The brand new egg stays an egg for 3 days.

·         Then it hatches into a larva and stays like that, growing constantly, for 6 days.

·         Next the nurse bees pack that larval cell with lots of food and cap it over. The larva is now considered a pupa. It stays a pupa for 12 days.

As soon as a baby bee emerges from her cell, she lets her wings dry a bit, turns around and cleans out the cell she just came out of, and then heads for the front door to take a GPS flight, better known as an orienting flight. That happens 21 days after the egg was laid.

Voilà! 21 days after that first major egg-laying, I saw the

Hatch-Out!

That’s when each little bee sets its internal GPS system so it will always recognize home. It only lasted about 15 minutes, and then it was over and everybody settled down to normal. I wonder if there will be another one tomorrow for the eggs she laid just a couple of days later?

Hatch-outs occur pretty much every day during the summer, especially when there’s been a strong honey-flow, but because so many foragers were coming and going from the hive, it never looked like anything special. Little did I know. It took a drought to teach me a bee-lesson. 

Isn’t this amazing?

 

BEEattitude for Day # 332:

       Blessed are those who recognize the small miracles of life, for they shall live in wonder.

 

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Green as a Garden Hose, the 3^rd Biscuit McKee Mystery,

is now available in mass market paperback

from World Wide Mystery, a division of Harlequin.

(Go to www.eHarlequin.com and search for Fran Stewart)

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