Day old baby chicks hatched January 1st Happy New Year

We tried our hand at hatching eggs and it was delightful!! We didn't have the best hatch rate due to not checking the incubator temperature and humidity with an extra thermometer. But we did get 5 adorable baby chicks out of the adventure!!

I put the chicks in a cardboard box which we cut out a window opening for the kids to observe the cute balls of fluff! We trained the baby chicks not to jump out of the little opening... lol, just kidding! We covered the opening with plexiglass which we just duck taped on the reverse side. It was absolutely perfect for the kids to watch the chicks without being able to reach their hands in a touch them...constantly! I also taped a thermometer to the window so we could keep track of the temperature. This was one job that Henry (my oldest, 6 years old) was in charge of! He was responsible to make sure the temperature was at a certain point each week. He did a great job and it was very easy way to introduce temperature tracking into our homeschool discussion.

Busy Busy Bees

Memorial Day is just another day in the busy busy buzzin life of a honey bee. 

Today was brew day! The guys brewed 40 gallons of beer and during all the pictures of beer brewing I took time out to photograph our busy busy bees takin care of some pollination! If you don't enjoy bee pictures, now might be the time to stop looking cause I took a ton of pictures and here is but a few of those pictures..........

Bees are SO impressive!!!

Hive Entrance of a Swarm colony transfer Top Bar Hive

This is a very strong colony of bees that was brought in from one of our swarm traps. They were transferred into the Top Bar Hive a few minutes before this video was taken. They are adjusting very nicely to their new home and quickly learn the "ins and outs" to their new location.

Bee Swarm Caught using a bait hive Video of the Transfer

Transferring a colony of bees from a swarm trap into a Kenyan Top Bar Hive. Inside the bait hive, we put a small super frame with old black brood comb and the bees absolutely loved it! As you can see in the opening picture, the black comb was a huge hit with the swarm! We also used lemon grass oil to bait them.

Queen Bee Piping!! Videos of our new Queen Piping!

First, I would like to say that I am quite gullible! I will believe pretty much anything Bryan tells me, so of course YES he does trick me sometimes and YES I do believe him! We ordered a queen bee for one of our colonies. Bryan put her into the top bar hive and what happened next brought on quite an interesting dialogue!

Dialogue as follows...

Bryan:  "Our new queen is Piping"

Abby: "Ok....wait, What!?"

Bryan: "Virgin Queen bees will make a noise (insert his impersonation of the noise here) when they enter a new colony and its called Piping".

Abby: (laughing, thinking this is really a stretch for him to make this up!) "WHAAAT!?!? Are you messing with me? Cause I really thing you are messing with me!?"

Bryan: "No Im serious. Shes doing it right now!"

Abby: "WHAAAT!" (while running for the camera!) 

Ok folks...As if bees could be any more amazing, they go off and do something like this!! 

Piping: "Piping describes a noise made by virgin and mated queen bees during certain times of the virgin queens' development. Fully developed virgin queens communicate through vibratory signals: "quacking" from virgin queens in their queen cells and "tooting" from queens free in the colony, collectively known as piping. A virgin queen may frequently pipe before she emerges from her cell and for a brief time afterwards. Mated queens may briefly pipe after being released in a hive.

Piping is most common when there is more than one queen in a hive. It is postulated that the piping is a form of battle cry announcing to competing queens and the workers their willingness to fight. It may also be a signal to the worker bees which queen is the most worthwhile to support.

The piping sound is a G♯ or A♮. The adult queen pipes for a two-second pulse followed by a series of quarter-second toots.^[2] The queens of Africanized bees produce more vigorous and frequent bouts of piping."

Bryan was able to get several good videos of her piping...listen careful, its quite impressive!!

Ordering a Queen Bee Online

One of the swarms that Bryan has caught this year is without a Queen...they were not making a queen for themselves, so we ordered a Queen bee to add to the colony. We purchased her online from QueenBeesForSale.com. We have been very pleased with the Corniolan bees so we wanted a Corniolan queen for that hive.

Corniolans:  "It is favored among beekeepers for several reasons, not the least being its ability to defend itself successfully against insect pests while at the same time being extremely gentle in its behavior toward beekeepers. These bees are particularly adept at adjusting worker population to nectar availability. It relies on these rapid adjustments of population levels to rapidly expand worker bee populations after nectar becomes available in the spring, and, again, to rapidly cut off brood production when nectar ceases to be available in quantity. It meets periods of high nectar with high worker populations and consequently stores large quantities of honey and pollen during those periods. They are resistant to some diseases and parasites that can debilitate hives of other subspecies."

She arrived overnight UPS in a hard case along with a few nurse bees to accompany her on the journey. I was so excited when the UPS truck pulled up...I met him in the front yard and said "Oh yeah! Is this my bee!" To which he paused and said "Your What!?". Oh oops, you didnt know you had some bees riding around next to you all day! I just said Thank you and went on inside.

This container was inside the UPS mailer...so I opened it on up to check and make sure everyone arrived safely and unharmed. The while tube coming out of the top of the cage is full of soft candy. This way the bees from the new colony can eat through the candy to release the queen slowly into the hive. 

Here she is in the hive getting to know her new colony.