Here's a rundown on my bee installation adventures last weekend.  I won't go into any of the photography thoughts on this post, it'll just bee about the bees.  I'll follow it up with a separate post about the actual photography a bit later.

Note: I'll be using small images here.  If you want the full sized images, just click the image and view All Sizes in Flickr.  If you want the full blow-by-blow description of all 220 pictures, you can view the entire set directly here.

The Objective

The whole goal of this process is to get these...

Into this (the hive body)...

It seems like a fairly simple task until you consider that every one of those little critters has two native abilities that we humble hoomans do not... they can fly and they can sting. :-S

Prep Work

First, Rob preps the frames by spraying them with sugar and water (bee fewd).

Then our fearless warrior dons his armor and prepares to do battle.

Then, we go to work on the Box O' Bees...

...by first pulling out the queen bee and her attendants.

The queen's little prison gets tacked into place in the hive...

...and then we dump all the rest of them on top of her!

Time For Fewd!

The next part of the exercise is to get the bees down in the hive and load it all up with lots of food.  Rob started with the task of getting them all down in the hive itself (instead of on top of the frames)...

That wasn't working so well.  They were beeing quite uncooperative no matter how much we explained the process to them.  So, Rob decided to just dump the food in and let the bees figure out where they needed to go.

The bags are filled with sugar water, which is what the bees will slowly consume.  After getting the bags in place, a slit is made in the top of each bag to allow the bees access.

Building It Up

Once the food's taken care of, we still need to finish off the upper portion of the hive.  The first step in that process is to install the "super"...

...And that's followed up with the lids.  One internal (the "top cover")...

...and an external one ("telescoping cover") weighted down with bricks to stop it from blowing off if there's a storm or anything (a nasty one was on the way).

Miscellany

There were still a few miscellaneous minor tasks to complete, but that was pretty much all the hive work that needed to be done.  A number of bees are still out flying and crawling around and it took them a few hours to start working their way back into the hive...

A couple hours later we were down to this...

Of course, there were casualties in the process...

The Finale!

But, at the end of the day, we ended up with a relatively happy beekeeping family...

Thursday, April 19, 2007 8:04 AM

Ok, this is kind of off my usual range of topics, but it's a little too odd for me to ignore without posting about it.

As some of my previous posts have alluded to, I spent last Saturday taking pictures of a friend setting up his new bee hive.  I'll be posting up a separate (and long) entry about that soon enough.  If you want the entire process, you can check out my 222 photos over on my Flickr set titled Beekeeping 101.

What I find a little odd is that even though I have no real interest in bees and I don't subscribe to any bee-related RSS feeds, newsletters or websites, a lot of my feeds have been suddenly flooded with bee posts.  A prime example is this one over on The Online Photographer (I'll post some comments over there when I'm done with this).  The author (Mike Johnston) goes into some hypothetical questions about what we as a society would do if it was proven that cell phones are causing the decline of bee populations.  I have to note that this is not some chase of fantasy, as several other sites have mentioned the same thing...  CoolSmartPhone, Engadget, Sci Fi Tech (Sci-Fi Channel), Tribe, etc.  I'm guessing a vast majority of these started up because of the article that ran in The Independent on the 15th (although other major rags have run similar ones).

Anyway...  Stories like that have been popping up all over my RSS subscriptions over the past few days.  I just thought it was rather strange that I'd just finished shooting the install of a hive right before all these starting flooding in.

So, what do I think about the whole "bee death" issue?  Well, I don't really think about it at all.  Honestly, this is just not something I really care about.  I'm not saying that I won't care in the future, it's just not really a pressing concern for me (yes, I'm kind of shallow at times... this is one of them).  Personally, I don't like bees.  They sting (duh).  They're not cute.  They interfere with my outdoorish activities.   Seriously, what's to like about all that?  Sure, the whole pollination thing is going to be an issue, but it's not enough of an issue (to me) to get past my whole general dislike of bees. 

Don't get me wrong, the whole bee photography thing was kind of cool (even though I did get stung), and there are a few shots that I'll probably always be relatively proud of, but it didn't make me a "bees are cool" convert or anything. 

Ack, I'm rambling again.  Ok, I'll sum it all up...  The whole bee death phenomena and the timing of it in regards to my recent photo shoot is weird.  It'll suck if bees everywhere start dropping dead and it'll probably have a huge impact.  But, I just don't care that much about it... yet.

Note: In case you want to comment on this, rest assured that I'll approve any comments from unregistered users as long as you keep the following in mind...  If you use fowl language, I'll edit it.  If you use enough foul language, I'll just nuke the post.  If you are selling something or want me or my readers to go to another site not related to this topic or my blog, I'll nuke the post.  If you enter the same comment multiple times, I'll nuke the post.  It's my blog and I can manage it however I see fit.  Deal!  My family reads this, be reasonable.  Disagree and post your opinions all you like, just don't be a jerk about it.  I'm pretty liberal, so chances are I won't nuke anything that doesn't directly go against the above. I'm only posting this because I used far more external links than usual and Google seems to really pick up on that, so it's possible a number of people who normally wouldn't come here will want to flame me based on this one post. All your bee are belong to us!

Monday, April 16, 2007 9:55 AM

Ok, first the short post... here's my semi-regularly scheduled blog picture:

Yes, those are bees.  I took a ton of shots a friend's place this weekend and this is the one I like best so far.  I'm going to finish processing the rest of them (about 150 or so to go) and I'll post up a much longer entry when I can kind of go through the entire process.  See ya!