Spring update

(Texas) I stood in front of my hives yesterday evening after the sun had gone below the trees. There in my t-shirt, flip-flops, and scrub bottom feeling the breeze push along my back. A hint of evening coolness which feels like a luxury, knowing that summer is approaching. The bees on three hives were bearded along the landings. A sense of winding up, finishing a days work, and taking in the evening just as me. Healthy hives, booming, in the midst of the spring flow. The world is rich. And good. That’s what they seem to be saying.

Saturday night I finished putting in wire and foundation in another ten frames for a medium super. That was placed on a hive today. The three hives doing well are the ones with Bee Weaver queens. I am reaping the benefit of last year’s travails. The fourth hive is the only genetic remnant of my father’s hives. They have done nothing in the third super, indicating weakness, or a slow start. I had weakened that hive last fall by robbing what was probably most of their honey stores. I didn’t do that to the others. But activity continues in it.

The stock tank is a fetid mess. The only improvement was the placement of reeds taken from the front pond. The gold fish died, presumably due to a bacterial bloom and oxygen deprivation. The water stinks. I took a closer look yesterday and noticed an alarming number of mosquito larvae. So I caught some gambusia (mosquito fish) from the front pond and placed them in the stock tank. Those things are survivors. If anything can survive in that stock tank, it’s those fish. I had only placed a small aquarium pump inside the tank, corded from the garage. I can’t seem to find my old aquarium air pump. I’m not sure the water-circulating pump is doing much of anything, but maybe it is.

I have also started with wax production. Most of the cappings from last season had ended up in my bird bath. I had left the cappings in a collander on the bird bath with the intention of the bees cleaning them out. The problem was that the wax melted and essentially became part of the bird bath. Yesterday I scraped out most of the wax. It was thick with leaves and dried plant seeds. It was black and grey (see first picture below). I modified the solar wax melter by placing an old black barbecue tarp inside, under the theory that it would create more heat. As ugly as that wax and vegetation confection was, and as many times as it had melted, over and over in the bird bath, it seemed to come out just fine after a bit of sun and coffee filter treatment. The wheat from the chaff. The refiner’s fire. Wax from the crap–a new metaphor for our times. The last picture is wax that I purified today, that originally came from old brown/black comb on a queen excluder. Usually the wax forms a disc shape in the water bath. But interestingly today these unique creations made their appearance, probably because the water was never sufficiently hot to melt the wax.

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One Response to Spring update

  1. ljwestover says:

    Nice photos. The filtered wax looks great and probably smells good too.

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