Hello HIIVE community,
I hope you have had a good start to spring with your bees in HIIVE and are now having a good time with your honey bees as summer approaches. My honey bees have successfully wintered over the cold days and the honey bee population in HIIVE has slowly grown. In the first picture you can see how my honey bees huddled together at the end of February to keep the other honey bees and their brood warm.
When the weather was warm on some days in February and March, some bees flew out of the HIIVE. The second picture is from February and the third picture is from March.
They both show the flight of my honey bees from the HIIVE.
From January to the end of March I had doubts whether my honey bees would live or die in the hive. But my honey bees showed at the end of March that I was wrong with my doubts, because they developed very well at the end of March, such as the bee population has increased and they are slowly building the wax combs in the HIIVE. The fourth picture shows the development status of my honey bees in the HIIVE at the end of March.
At the beginning of April, I gave my honey bees in the HIIVE vitamin sugar water once and continuous feed dough. I wanted to promote the health of my bee colony and be 100% sure that they would not have any supply bottlenecks in the HIIVE. As a result, my honey bee population in the HIIVE exploded and the combs that were built to mid-height in the brood chamber of the HIIVE were built to the floor in the brood chamber of the HIIVE. The fifth picture shows the situation where the combs were built to the end of the brood chamber in the HIIVE.
This resulted in me placing the honey room on top of the brood chamber to reduce swarming and to harvest some honey from the bees later. All the while I have been giving forage dough to reduce the stress on my honey bee hive caused by the honey production in the honey room in the HIIVE. The six pictures show that my honey bees have built some combs in the honey room.
The seventh picture shows the fly activity of my honey bees in the HIIVE at the end of April.
Yesterday, on the second of May (the eighth picture shows).
I observed a behavior on the outer hive of the HIIVE that I have only observed in natural honey bee colonies from a tree cavity: Some honey bees responsible for collecting nectar and pollen in my colony were no longer foraging , but engaged in social gromming. This means that the honey bees rid each other of mites. This behavior has been seen where the bees live in a natural environment and have not been enslaved to produce large quantities of honey for humans. This means that my bees have a security of supply from honey and have more time to groom than to ensure a security of supply from honey in the hive. I hope you enjoyed reading my text and I will keep you updated this year.
Yours sincerely
Sinan