Bees!
Since we haven’t yet caught a swarm, and we were told about a local source, we decided to purchase a 3-frame nuc (3 Langstroth frames with worker bees, brood and a queen). On June 13, Matt drove to the east side of Guelph and picked up a nuc from Tibor Szabo’s farm.
The nuc came in the box on the right – if you zoom in you can see all the bees poking their little antennas out the screen.
We gently smoked the bees and transferred the frames from the nuc to our Tanzanian top-bar hive. We added 4 more bars and then squeezed up the follower board to reduce the hive-space to a manageable size.
Matthew cut separator strips to 1) ensure that the initial frames were perfectly parallel to each other (otherwise the comb on the topbars won’t be straight) and 2) to keep the bees below so they don’t have the opportunity to adhere to the cover.
We plugged 2/3 of the entrance holes to decrease what the bees need to defend.
Week 1 - June 21
We opened up the hive and peeked at what the bees were up to ...
We were thrilled to see quite a bit of new comb.
Clearly there wasn’t enough space for the bees to get around inside the hives with the 3 Lang frames – so they chewed themselves some pathways – busy bees!
We opened up all 3 entrances to give the bees more space to groove.
Week 2 - June 29
We were going to open the hive right up but when we began to pull the top bars apart the bees were chaining between the bar they’re building on and two bars back towards the follower board – we didn’t want to disturb their work. We pulled the follower board back and watched. They’ve built quite a lot of comb on the first topbar and made a good start on the next bar in.
We were going to open the hive right up but when we began to pull the top bars apart the bees were chaining between the bar they’re building on and two bars back towards the follower board – we didn’t want to disturb their work. We pulled the follower board back and watched. They’ve built quite a lot of comb on the first topbar and made a good start on the next bar in.
