Attack of the 50 Foot Bug

Strange behavior at the hive May 6, 2010

One of the things that I’ve noticed recently is that the bees sometimes like to cluster and hang out on the front of the hive. This behavior is called bearding. This helps with regulating the temperature of the hive. If the hive is less crowded, air flows through it better. Right now, my best guess is that there are probably 15,000-20,000 bees in the hive. I am beginning to get a little concerned with the amount of sunlight that is hitting the hive during the day. A good bit of sunshine in the morning to wake them up is fine but, I may have to provide some additional shade fairly soon.

There is one other thing that is interesting. When the bees are clustering on the front of the hive they perform a behavior that looks like scrubbing. They will obsessively scrub the landing on the hive with their front feet. I’m going to try and capture a video of it soon.

I’ve recently added a shallow super to the hive. It’s the top yellow section pictured above. The bees have just about finished drawing out the frames with comb in the hive body. The larger orange section is the hive body which contains the queen and brood. I want to keep the queen down in the hive body to prevent the mixing of honey and brood. I’m using a queen excluder to do this. It provides enough an opening for the worker bees to pass through to the top areas of the hive but, is too small for the queen to pass.