Tuesday 08 may 2018

Hello readers,

Temperatures today were going where they couldn't yesterday, almost 29°C! The picture is from early morning and it's already over 20°C!

Good activity near the hive. Although you can still see I made a mess looking for that frame of eggs...

I might show you what I did yesterday in the hive whilst looking for a frame of eggs in a video on a later date...  Say 22nd may?  Episode 8 - remember the cut out?

But because I didn't find a frame of eggs I decided to call the people with the apple tree (see yesterday's post) I'd come to look into their problem next week.  If they wanted to call somebody else up I would understand and asked them to let me know I was no longer needed.

I did make some preparations to close off the tree enterance (Although I didn't do any measurments when I was out there).  Let's hope I can install this device on the tree next monday 14th of may.

First up I bought a plastic bee extractor

As you can see in the first picture I already made a hole in a board where I'm going to stick this onto:

 



















On top of that closing it all off will be a plastic box:

But that's for later in the design.

First up sticking the device on the board:

And then nailing it into place:

Since a board can't seal off a rugged surface like a tree all that well we'll stick some foam on the backside of this board:

Now the extractor should work.

I want to try something new and lead the bees through my hive instead of letting them walk into it when they try to get back into theirs.

This might lead the queen bee into the hive box sooner - where they might fight it off if there's a new one in there already... But if she comes out before one is hatched she might kill them and stay in my box!

The idea is to fit a tube from a water hose onto my plastic box, using the old and trusty ducktape method:

Inside of the box with the hose sticking throug. (I hope the bees find it)

(Don't mind the white hoola-hoop in the background, it's sitting behind my surface there)

So the idea is to ducktape the box on top of the board with the extractor and put the tube into the hive enterance so the bees have to go through the hive to go out and forage.

I'll keep you posted when I use this, which hopefully is monday the 14th!

After all this was done I also fitted the buzzbox on one of my Zander Boxes, but there seems to be something wrong with how I set up the kit.  I have to reconfigure the WIFI settings, that too is a tale for later!

Bob Out