Hot Hot Hot

I have been out of town through the week all month and it has been record breaking hot. Not much if any rain and there are patches of brown vegetation all around. Do wish I had help from a researcher or someone who could set up a real test to see just how well my hives perform. But what I have noticed is that the bees are not "boiling" out of the hive.

What I mean is that last year when I had a Langstroth hive the bees would have hundreds of bees on the outside of the hive all day and night when it was hot. Many people said that was normal and that is one of the ways bees keep cool in the summer. One of the features of my hives should be better ventilation. Even in this heat I have never seen any bees on the outside of the hives. I hope this is because of the ventilation system.

I will open the hives sometime over the holiday weekend to see just how full the hives are. I have been told that the first year not to expect much honey to harvest but I have high hopes.

WiFi

WiFi, Wireless Fidelity, 802.11, and many other terms are all I have been thinking about lately. Take a look at my employer's website. www.xirrus.com

I did get a chance to look into my hives the other day. Just a quick peek, they are growing and making honey. It has been hot the last week and I wish I had a monitor to keep data on the inside of the hives but I don't. The fact that the hive is growing would indicate that they are doing well enough, I hope. Well there is nothing I can do about it anyway I am back on the road building WiFi networks. It pays the bills.

I still hope to get a mass production version of my hive by next season but not sure if I can make it.

I stopped by the farm that is looking for bees and as of yet no one has brought any over and the guy I found who had hive for sale has not delivered. I guess I will have to invest in late season packages and get them installed in August. I need to make one more stop to insure seal the deal.

This is the nice part of bee keeping. Unlike keeping other animals I don't have feed or water them daily. For the most part the best think you can do is just leave bees alone. Give them a proper hive box and they do the rest.

Small Hive Beetles (SHB)

The SMB is a new parasidic insect that makes a total mess out of a hive. There are plenty of resources that will give you all then information you can handle on them but I got them, in one hive. It is isolated so if I get SMB in the other two it will be from cross contamination, or a wild infestation. I hope I not cross contaminate so I hope to keep SMB out of those hives.

There are chemical treatments for them but at this point I don't want to put much of anything in my hives. I want to keep them as organic as possible. They sell traps and I may get a few but I will wait until the bees have a gard time controlling them. Some hives can ward off the SMB or at least keep them under control.

Only time will tell.