It's finally summery warm and the bees seem to be loving it. This morning, I took out the tar paper from inside the hive at Beck's house on Bethel street. I had put the paper into the hives to partition off empty space, so that the comb would stay warmer. Towards the end of the day today, they were forming a beard on the hive porch as if they were scheming to swarm. It might be the heat. The tar paper had some comb built on it and they also built comb on the vent bar, which I moved all the way to the back. They were running out of space. Hopefully the additional quarters will keep them from splitting off.
At my house, the bees were also acting strangely. They suddenly all flew out of the hive at once. I was trying to pull out the bottom board and it was stuck. I went into the shop to get some tools and when I came out, the bees were pouring out of the hive like a bee tornado. It looked like all of the bees came out and there were a lot of them. There was a cloud of bees up in the sky.
My neighbor told me that he saw them do the same thing earlier in the day. No idea what's going on...This is not swarming behavior as far as I know. They flew around for a short time and then came back in.
|