M'Lis and I went out to check our hives. My bees had built pure white burr comb on the inner cover, right between my two on-the-cheap Ziploc feeders. I never saw white burr comb in my hive last year - it was always yellow - and this looked exactly like spun sugar. I love sweets, and all I wanted to do was scrape it off and eat it. I didn't feed my bees sugar syrup last year, and I wonder if this comb - a product of the bees' bodies - has this white color because of the granulated sugar they've been eating.
 |
| Eggs look like little grains of rice |
Another beekeeper showed us how to hold up the frames at an angle with our backs to the sun, so we could see the eggs. How exciting, the moment when our eyes made sense of the tiny white grain of rice in the center of each cell, and we knew the queens were laying!
We also checked Ben and Pete's two hives, our carpool buddies. We were interested to see that their hives were about equally far along, although Pete's has consumed over two gallons of sugar syrup, and Ben's has consumed none. Makes me wonder, is there really value in feeding them syrup? Two hives is too few to draw conclusions.
No comments:
Post a Comment