Garden is BUZZINGGGG!!

[ccwonka]

Not really a question, just an excited post!!!!!!! :-D

Our garden is BUZZZZZZING with our bees (cucumbers, tomatoes, squashes, peppers, green beans, strawberries) though it's not big enough to come close to what they need.  We're gonna plant a 1/2 acre with white clover this fall (for both deer and bees), and we have just put in a 50'x75' patch of wildflowers next to the house (with watermellons and pumpkins mixed in).  I'm not really worried about their forage, we share a border with Berry College's Wildlife Management Area, so there's 26,000 undeveloped acres less than 100 yards from the hives, but with the dry weather you never know . . . and the stuff in our yard (food) gets watered regularly.

My 2.5 week old nucs haven't drawn any comb worth mentioning beyond the three frames they started with, so I've ordered some wax foundation and frames that I hope they'll do better with (but with everyone behind on shipping I don't really expect to recieve them till July) . . . I'm even flirting with the idea of removing the pierco and just adding popsicle stick to the frames one at a time as they move outward, sprayed the plastic with sugar water, they just don't seem to like it, and the frames from the nuc were wax drawn comb.

Opened the hives tonight and checked the frames just to the outside of the nuc frames, they've barely drawn anything except a couple finger shaped combs running down the face (and only on the side facing the already drawn comb), and not really with the pattern on the foundation.  The brood frames look great, they have a ton of honey and pollen on the outside of the frames, didn't see the queen in either hive, but honestly didn't look . . . there was lots of various brood and I only pulled one established frame from each hive.  Didn't feel the need to disturb them further, though I must say I've opened them three times in 2.5 weeks and not worn a bit of equipment once, just a few puffs of smoke (and I use a frame puller for that extra three inches between bees and hands).

At about 4:30 the hive to the Left goes nuts with orientation flights, I msitook it for robbing till I looked it up on this site, about 5:15 the other hive starts them as the left on winds down.  The hive on the left gets up about an hour earlier than the one on the right, but the one on the right seems to work more franticaly during the heat of the day (maybe marathoners and sprinters?!?!?).

Thanks again to everyone on this site, a wealth of information!!!! 8-)

[my-smokepole]

Did you add wax to the plastic frames? Before you gave it to them. If you didn't the next time you mite try it. It should help from all I have read. I Just running drone frames in plastic.
My -smokepole

[Moonshae]

If there isn't enough forage, they won't have any reason to draw the combs. Are you feeding them? If not, it sounds like they need it.

[ccwonka]

Put two boardman feeders full of syrup 15' in front of the hives (surrounded by flour to keep the ants out).  They never touched them   :-\.  Once it rained the ants started to hit the syrup hard, so I refloured once, they still didn't touch the syrup and were foraging hard, so I eventualy just let the ants have it, once they emptied it I put water into them and let them be.

But no, I never put extra wax on them, don't have any handy . . . did spray them with sugar water . . . I think I'd rather just go with the wax foundation than continualy modify and coerce the bees into the plastic stuff . . . (or at least that's how I feel at this moment, who knows in a month or year!!!)

CC

[CBEE]

if you think they are buzzing in the garden now , wait till the corn tassles out . They get in mine so thick you can here them a good distance away :-D

[Gware]

I had some plastic foundation and they would not touch the stuff. They went above it and built burr comb, so I added wax foundation and they were all over it.