Welcome - Explore my Blog

I've been keeping this blog for all of my beekeeping years and I am beginning my 19th year of beekeeping in April 2024. Now there are more than 1300 posts on this blog. Please use the search bar below to search the blog for other posts on a subject in which you are interested. You can also click on the "label" at the end of a post and all posts with that label will show up. At the very bottom of this page is a list of all the labels I've used.

Even if you find one post on the subject, I've posted a lot on basic beekeeping skills like installing bees, harvesting honey, inspecting the hive, etc. so be sure to search for more once you've found a topic of interest to you. And watch the useful videos and slide shows on the sidebar. All of them have captions. Please share posts of interest via Facebook, Pinterest, etc.

I began this blog to chronicle my beekeeping experiences. I have read lots of beekeeping books, but nothing takes the place of either hands-on experience with an experienced beekeeper or good pictures of the process. I want people to have a clearer picture of what to expect in their beekeeping so I post pictures and write about my beekeeping saga here.Master Beekeeper Enjoy with me as I learn and grow as a beekeeper.

Need help with an Atlanta area swarm? Visit Found a Swarm? Call a Beekeeper. ‪(404) 482-1848‬

Want to Pin this post?

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Problems with Proteus

I opened Proteus as part of my inspection today to see how they were doing with the starter strips in the medium box. What a mess! These bees are building comb like gangbusters but are ignoring any guidance from me via the starter strips. Consequently, the first frame I examined (#2) looked like this.


















I didn't remove any further frames from the box because there was comb going every which way and sticking the frames together. Here's the view looking down into the box at frames #3 and #4.
Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
See the mess and the broken comb from when I tried to pull out the frame.
Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

When I put the box back together a huge clump of comb was in the box and I needed to get it out of the way, so I put it on the deck rail with all of the bees on it. They moved off of it but stayed in a clump and I realized that these were house bees, unused to flying. So I went inside and got a Sierra cup and brushed the bees into the cup and shook them onto the hive. The comb had unripe honey all in it so I took it indoors to discourage robbing.


















Later today I went back into the hive to work a little on the mess. Below you can see a comb out into the space between frames. I took a Swiss army knife and cut the comb loose and straightened it onto the bottom of the frame. I still need to cut some comb out that is layering behind it, but I had to go back to work and will have to deal with that on another day.


















Here you can see it cut and moved but there is still a problem with this frame that I need to address soon on another visit, but I had to go back to work and we have had storms all evening so no chance of reopening the hive until another day.


















Needless to say, this was a difficult turn of events and I did not do a powdered sugar shake on Proteus....both because I was a little panicked about what was going wrong in the comb building and because with all the dripping honey, I figured the powdered sugar would make a real mess.
Posted by Picasa

No comments:

Post a Comment

Pin this post

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...