Thermal Imaging
I wondered whether heat from the bees would be visible, providing a way of checking on affairs in the hive without opening it in winter.
Read MoreBuzzings
I'm learning to recognise the different buzzings of the bees.
Read MoreDrone, Forlorn
This morning was bright and sunny. I went outside to stand in the welcome November sun, and saw a large bee on the landing board of the Copper hive. It was a drone - a male bee - recognisable by his size, his fuzzy roundedness and his big eyes.
It's unlikely that he spent a cold, damp night on the landing board out of choice. He is reliant on his sisters - the worker bees who do all the foraging, make all the honey and run the hive - for food and shelter. The drone exists only to mate, but that is a spring/summer activity; there are no virgin queens looking to settle down and start a family at this time of year. So as the colony in autumn undergoes that process that corporate entities euphemistically refer to as "rationalisation and restructuring", a drone can find himself surplus to requirements. The ground in front of an autumn hive is littered with drones who have received their notices of redundancy, dying from exposure and starvation.
Let us hope that he had a nice summer, spending the long days lazing around, eating honey and flying out in the afternoon to drone congregation areas to hang around in the hope of meeting a nice young queen. Evidently he did not actually succeed in mating, since if he had he would not be here...mating being a terminal act for the drone in much the same way that stinging is terminal for the worker.
When the sun warmed the front of the hive, the workers came out but the drone lay still. I went out again later and he had gone. Perhaps he was still alive and went in to the hive or flew away. But I rather suspect he was carried off by an undertaker bee tidying up. It doesn't do to have dead bodies piling up by your front door.
Me and my drone - in summer
Update 30 November 2016
It was cold last night. Here on the Copper hive landing board, two drones and a pollen forager have been caught by the frost.
My book says that all drones are gone from a hive by September. Evidently that is not the case for the Copper hive. It may be that the strength of this colony has allowed it to support more drones for longer. But probably the book is just oversimplified.
By the time September comes, all the drones will have been forcibly ejected from the colony by the workers.
- The BBKA Guide to Beekeeping, 2012. Davis & Cullum-Kenyon
Honey Blackberry Brandy
Ingredients: Brandy, honey, blackberries.
Honey stirred into warm brandy, freshly-picked blackberries steeped in the brandy-honey mixture, then the mixture filtered. A by-product of making the drink is a pile of brandy-soaked fruit, which I think will go very well with vanilla ice-cream.
The Bee Gym
The Bee Gym is a grooming station for honey bees, intended to assist the bees in ridding themselves of the varroa parasite.
Read MorePads and Claws
Bees' feet are more complicated than our own. A lot of engineering goes into them, to allow the bees to walk on different surfaces. Most bees I know can walk up glass, whereas most people I know can't. Jonathan Pattrick is a local student doing his PhD thesis on how flower petals and bees' feet interact, and he gave an evening talk to the CBKA on this subject.
See those tarsal claws, like grappling hooks at the tip of each leg? Those, Jonathan explained, are for walking on rough surfaces. Each foot has two claws, hooking outward. Between the claws is an adhesive pad. This secretes a liquid so that the foot can stick to a smooth surface by surface tension. The foot is unfoldable to expose the pad. So to walk on a rough surface, the bee uses its claws. To walk on a smooth surface, the bee unfolds its feet and uses the sticky pads, placing each pad down and then peeling it off in exactly the right way to detatch it.
Jonathan showed video footage from a light microscope positioned under a slide, looking up as the bee walked over the slide. You could see the footpads spreading over the glass to stick down and then peeling off again. The pads are BIG. The whole foot unfolds.
Apparently these unfoldable adhesive pads are found in ants and wasps as well as bees, but each species has its own version. And while honey bees have big sticky pads, those of bumble bees are much smaller. Which means, in practice, a honey bee can walk up a hollyhock flower (very smooth) whereas a bumble bee cannot - the bumble bee has to fly in for a direct landing on the anthers.
Debate ensued as to how flowers might be manipulating insects by having rough or smooth petals to pick and choose their pollinators - is the hollyhock strategically directing bumble bees to touchdown right on the pollen-covered anthers? Do other flowers "deliberately" have rough surfaces so that their chosen pollinators can easily walk in? What does that mean for crop breeding programmes? Hopefully Jonathan will return to tell us more when he has completed his thesis.
Meanwhile, I took this photograph of an ichneumon wasp on the window at home. Feet in action!