Sunday: 14 June 2009
By the time it was light yesterday morning the turtle was long gone. Glenn had retrieved an old bee super with a mesh cloth stapled over it so for the moment it’s used as a nest guard and to keep pedestrians away. It’s not flush to the ground so there are exits but whatever hatches is still a couple of months in the future.
The problem, anyway, was not in guarding the nest, but rather in what comes after. There is a period of several weeks of vulnerability while the yolk sac absorbs and the carapace hardens. One option would be to keep the baby turtles sequestered and protected for that period of time but at that point they become “pets,” I assume, and fall under the umbrella of Georgia wildlife laws. We’ll just have to see.
For the last couple of months Glenn has been involved with the newly formed Oglethorpe County bee club. Yesterday was a meeting, and Glenn pulled out construction materials for five hive bodies. The meeting was spent in constructing them, and Glenn kept three, donating the others. For several of the group constructing a beehive was a first, so it was a good and productive way to spend a meeting.
The materials are left over from the early 80s, when we had a couple of beehives in town and had thought we might build some more. We eventually moved them out here in the mid 80s but were unable to really keep them up. Still, everything had been boxed up and looks well preserved. These still have to be painted, and the brood frames need to be constructed and inserted into the bodies, where they’ll hang, ten of them, side by side.
These are the lower bodies that will serve as brood chambers. During honey season, you begin to pile on supers that contain frames for building cells that will contain the developing honey. To keep the queen from creating brood cells in the honey supers you insert a queen excluder, a board with slats just wide enough to permit the workers, but not the larger queen. After all, who wants larvae and pupae in their honey?
This is a foundation, a film of wax spread over a hexagonal mesh. It will fit into a frame like a stretched canvas.
The individual hexagons provide the template for the bees to build their brood cells in an orderly fashion, one layer on each side. The frames hang just far enough apart so that there is space between one frame and the next for the bees to be able to move between them, after building a single layer of cells.
There have been quite a few developments in the 25 years since we first got into this beekeeping stuff. There weren’t africanized honeybees to worry about at the time, at least not here. It was an option, then, to re-queen now and then but now it’s a necessity. And there are a few more diseases and pests now, too.
(The re-queening issue is an interesting one. You don’t want the queen to mate with males that might have africanized ancestry, so you buy one that’s been mated in a controlled fashion. You begin the hive with a few thousand worker bees. Rather than let them make their own queen, you introduce the purchased one in a little edible box. The workers chew through the box and by the time they’ve opened it they’re perfectly happy to accept the new queen. Theoretically they won’t make a new one, now.)
There will be a lot of things to re-learn, terminology for one. And hive psychology for another - I recall endless discussions of what the bees might do if we did this particular thing, and how might we discourage them from doing the other thing. It was usually our experience that if we thought of two things they might do in response to some action, the bees would think of a third unexpected response.
Beekeeping is one of those things that can get as involved as you care to make it, transiting if you wish from hobby to profession. It can be as sociable an occupation as you care to make it. Myself, I max out on my social tolerance between work and fire department but Glenn seems to be enjoying his bee club group. He’ll probably have some things to say about that.
The problem, anyway, was not in guarding the nest, but rather in what comes after. There is a period of several weeks of vulnerability while the yolk sac absorbs and the carapace hardens. One option would be to keep the baby turtles sequestered and protected for that period of time but at that point they become “pets,” I assume, and fall under the umbrella of Georgia wildlife laws. We’ll just have to see.
For the last couple of months Glenn has been involved with the newly formed Oglethorpe County bee club. Yesterday was a meeting, and Glenn pulled out construction materials for five hive bodies. The meeting was spent in constructing them, and Glenn kept three, donating the others. For several of the group constructing a beehive was a first, so it was a good and productive way to spend a meeting.
The materials are left over from the early 80s, when we had a couple of beehives in town and had thought we might build some more. We eventually moved them out here in the mid 80s but were unable to really keep them up. Still, everything had been boxed up and looks well preserved. These still have to be painted, and the brood frames need to be constructed and inserted into the bodies, where they’ll hang, ten of them, side by side.
These are the lower bodies that will serve as brood chambers. During honey season, you begin to pile on supers that contain frames for building cells that will contain the developing honey. To keep the queen from creating brood cells in the honey supers you insert a queen excluder, a board with slats just wide enough to permit the workers, but not the larger queen. After all, who wants larvae and pupae in their honey?
This is a foundation, a film of wax spread over a hexagonal mesh. It will fit into a frame like a stretched canvas.
The individual hexagons provide the template for the bees to build their brood cells in an orderly fashion, one layer on each side. The frames hang just far enough apart so that there is space between one frame and the next for the bees to be able to move between them, after building a single layer of cells.
There have been quite a few developments in the 25 years since we first got into this beekeeping stuff. There weren’t africanized honeybees to worry about at the time, at least not here. It was an option, then, to re-queen now and then but now it’s a necessity. And there are a few more diseases and pests now, too.
(The re-queening issue is an interesting one. You don’t want the queen to mate with males that might have africanized ancestry, so you buy one that’s been mated in a controlled fashion. You begin the hive with a few thousand worker bees. Rather than let them make their own queen, you introduce the purchased one in a little edible box. The workers chew through the box and by the time they’ve opened it they’re perfectly happy to accept the new queen. Theoretically they won’t make a new one, now.)
There will be a lot of things to re-learn, terminology for one. And hive psychology for another - I recall endless discussions of what the bees might do if we did this particular thing, and how might we discourage them from doing the other thing. It was usually our experience that if we thought of two things they might do in response to some action, the bees would think of a third unexpected response.
Beekeeping is one of those things that can get as involved as you care to make it, transiting if you wish from hobby to profession. It can be as sociable an occupation as you care to make it. Myself, I max out on my social tolerance between work and fire department but Glenn seems to be enjoying his bee club group. He’ll probably have some things to say about that.
