Oh no!

Bright and sunny, low to mid 60s. A nice day after week of cloudy and rainy days.

The hive shims and baggie feeders have been in the hives for the last few weeks and I needed to get them out. Last weekend I had the flu so I didn't feel up to it. I had just made some bee candy and figured it would be good to see if they liked it. So I get to the hives and the bees are just pouring out. There are a bunch of them flying around the entrance. I expected them to be going a little crazy since the weather has been so bad but it didn't feel right. This still being my first year I'm still not sure when to trust my feelings.

It was a good thing I went out. I popped the top off Hive 1 and there was a pretty heavy layer of condensation on the inside of the telescoping cover. That's bad. Ventilation at this time of year is very important. Bees can be cold but they have to be dry. Hopefully it was just because it has been so wet that there has been a lot of extra moisture in the air and this hasn't been an on-going problem for the last few weeks. So I got out some newspaper and tried to blot away as much of the condensation as I could and removed the Ziploc. There were a lot of bees coming out of the mouse guard and there were a bunch in the top hive body that I could see so they didn't seem too adversely affected. There seems to be a pretty good population. I put in a little piece of the bee candy, put on the inner cover (reversed for winter), and then the telescoping cover. Between the inner and telescoping covers I put a little piece of wood I had in my bee bucket to get more ventilation going.

On to Hive 2. Same situation, except worse. There was even more condensation on the inside of the telescoping cover and a little puddle on the Ziploc. I did basically the same thing as Hive 1 except tried to make sure and get more of the condensation soaked up with the newspaper. Too bad I didn't have something better in my bee bucket but I would have had to run back to the camper for paper towels and didn't want to have the hives open that long.

I really wanted to make sure I was doing the right things so I climbed the mountain to get a cell signal and called my buddy Tom. He verified what I had done so I went back down the mountain and, couldn't help myself, I had to check if the bees liked the bee candy. I lifted the cover and there were bees all over it. I guess they liked it!

Old Smokey

It was my birthday back on the 22nd. There was a party at my parents-in-law house because there a lot of birthdays in the family during October. Normally this wouldn't be Hive Talking material except that my parents-in-law gave me an old smoker that my father-in-law found while traveling. It is pretty cool. It is heavy metal and if I got a new bellows and cleaned it up a little it looks like it would be perfectly usable. I think I am going to hang it in the house, though, next to a decorative bee tile my sister-in-law made.

I'm also pretty excited that Michele gave me the book Natural Beekeeping by Ross Conrad. I haven't had a chance to start reading it yet but I'm sure it will be interesting.