September 2013 ... a swarm of activity

Well, It's been a couple of years since I put anything on this blog. Since the last post on here those bees died over the winter. I got new bees the next spring and watched them through the year and all looked good. But, once again they didn't make it through till spring. We left them all the honey in the fall, but when I opened the hive up they were one frame away from the honey and must have starved to death. Probably my fault but I like to blame it on them being Georgia bees. This year it was too late to order new bees so we were bee-less. Katie misses the bees.

A few weeks ago I saw some bees flying around the hive but figured they were just going in there and cleaning up any honey that I may have spilled in the hive and not cleaned up. Just last week I looked at the hive and noticed that there were a lot of bees coming and going. I opened the hive up and it is full of bees. A swarm must have moved in without me knowing it. I am not sure when they moved in but it was probably around the first of September. It could have been earlier I guess because I really wasn't checking on the hive because we didn't have any bees.

Maybe they will be a tougher, smarter, local bunch of bees that will make it through the winter. I only hope that they can get enough honey put together to last through the winter.

Below is a little bit of video that I took of them today (9-28-13). It was nice and warm today, almost 80 degrees. It looks like there was a lot of pollen going in. For some of the video I used the camera's slow motion video feature. It takes something like 120 frames per second and then plays them back at 30 frames per second to slow down the action. In the last clip you can see one of the bees dragging out a dead bee.

Kayla got a Mac book laptop from school to use for the year, so we made the video below using Imovie on it. It seemed easy enough to use although I felt like I should have been sitting in a coffee shop somewhere drinking a latte while I was using it.