some bees absolutely lost in the sauce on these bottlebrush flowers at a family member’s house
yes there is a bee in the last picture
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The wasps and what looks like a couple yellow jackets are having a goddamn aerial property dispute with Tim as an intermediary. (Tim is a truly massive bee(?) that has just been hanging out just outside our balcony. He never goes into it, just around the border.) One of the wasps is still building the nest. They need to be evicted due to my allergy but the aerial arguments are a bit funny to watch when they are in view.
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parasitoid beewolf wasp stinging and paralyzing a bee to take back to her burrow and lay her eggs in, where her babies will then hatch inside the bee and eat her alive.
this too is yuri.
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Another unique looking bee I found! Never really seen one with whitish striping!
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Some sort of bee I found! Not sure of the species but I love that you can see the pollen on her face in the third image!
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Yard Notes for MF Yard, 03.10.26
More photos and detailed notes under the cut.
Not as many notes as I probably should have, but I was very distracted. The client had messaged before about wanting to ask me about an opportunity lol, he’s super entrepreneur brained, and to let me know he wanted to record some of his own video of me working.
I know he’s pretty entertained by what I do, even though he doesn’t really understand a lot of it, so I thought he wanted the video to show his friends, since he hands out his honey to them. I was wrong.
His teenage son was there, first time meeting him. And the opportunity was that the client wants to turn his property into a destination, a cute little country getaway bnb thing where people can ride four wheelers, shoot targets, go fishing, and see some honeybees!
I was pretty annoyed that he was just volunteering me to be his employee; he said he wanted to offer hive tours, and I’m the only beekeeper around, so that means he expected me to run that whole thing. Thankfully it was very easy to dissuade him with some very surface level follow up questions: do you have liability insurance, for when someone gets pissed that they were stung and wanted to sue you? Are you going to set up security, so people aren’t killing your bees and costing you money while you’re away and they’re stuck on the property with nothing better to do but start messing with beehives? How much are you paying me for these hive tours? Will they work around MY schedule? Do I even want to do that?! Lol
He claims he’s just pitching the idea, nothing is set in stone, blah blah blah, but he wanted to get a video of my work to show his potential future ‘business partners’, so whatever. He made his son suit up and video my work though. He was a good kid, but he got nervous when the bees got spicy and he ended up bailing by the second colony lol. No judgement, it’s a natural instinct, but relief that I was no longer expected to perform and could just take care of the bees.
I’ve done agritourism with bees before, that was my whole job before starting my own Beekeeping business. I’m not interested in that again, especially for someone else, with no strong boundaries or protections in place!
Anyway, the bees are doing well. They’re continuing to flourish through the raw beginning of spring, and starting to even cap some honey cells.
Colony 1 was doing fine.
Colony 2 got a super on top of their second deep, they were plugging away!
Colony 3 has been weak since before winter. They’re building out fast, but still not ready for a super or second deep. Maybe by the end of the month.
Colony 4 was SUPER aggro, so I took a brood frame from them to start building out Nucs for the year (client has given permission for this).
Colony 5 was also aggro, and all the end of the apiary colonies always are, but they had brood and food in their super, so they got a second super. There still seems to be competition between those last colonies, so I angled colony 5 a bit more to reduce crowding, hopefully.
Colony 6 has a queen excluder under their super, so they’re working in there, just slowly. But their two deeps were looking well balanced with brood, food, and bees.
Colony 7 is the same as 6 essentially, and I took a frame of mostly eggs and larvae from them for the Nuc build.
All the colonies got 1:1 spring feed, and beetle sheets, though thankfully beetles were sparse this time.
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Double Removal, 03.09.26, Part Two: Wall Cut Out
The second colony was a fiasco. Just because I don’t have a FLIR and I really need one. For this exact situation!
We could see the entrance on the corner of the second story. We started there, trying to take siding off piece by piece to see how big the colony was.
Because the house was so old and abandoned, it was pretty much disintegrating, so it wasn’t too hard to pull apart, but we only got the very end of it exposed by the time we realized the colony was built in between the floor and ceiling, and the client would have to let us cut into the floor. Sadly, he wasn’t willing, despite reassuring us the whole time that he was a carpenter and could fix anything we needed to do. So I took so much comb and I could from our little access point, and tried to smoke out as many bees as possible, but no doubt there are thousands left and essentially all of the comb and resources still there.
The homeowner decided he was going to poison whatever was left, and just try his best to seal up the comb, despite my warnings that it would rot and attract other pests. We just took the survivors out to my apiary to hopefully assimilate with the other colonies. The homeowner was still quite gracious and tipped us for the effort.
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Obviously the real best live-action-imitating bee movie/tv-series would be a remake of the Mitsubachi Maya no Bouken anime, where the backgrounds keep that watercolory coloration, but the bees remain photorealistic.
Though I will admit to being biased, for I have massive childhood nostalgia for the Dutch dub of that anime. I should see if I can rewatch it somewhere.
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