Up Close and Personal....

Quite the experience yesterday....before getting my own hive I booked in to get up close and personal and see exactly what happens when you open up a hive...this one only had about 10,000 bees....it's a relatively new hive...and I have to say I was amazed at how little the bees mind when you open it up and start digging around in there....they are Italian honey bees ...the mood of the hive is dependant on the queen and apparently people specifically breed the queens  to be laid back.....

After smoking the hive lightly.....Bec opened it up.

 Even after Bec pulls out the frames they are still not attacking us...they start to make a louder buzzing the longer you muck around with them....but I was not remotely intimidated or harassed by angry bees trying to sting the bejesus out of me...which is what I thought would happen by the way.

Close up look at the bees ...the filled in bits are capped larvae waiting to turn into bees...this is from the main brood section.

 You need to inspect hives weekly in Spring for lots of reasons but the main thing is to ensure the queen is ok...when Bec opened up this box she found a queen cell ..which is a cell that contains a queen larvae...you need to destroy these if you already have a queen laying eggs otherwise when the new queen hatches the old queen nicks off taking half of the bees with her causing a swarm...it really is fascinating how the colony works.  I am keen now to get my own hive even though my man is not remotely interested...the world needs bees !!

Whitish stuff outside edge is capped honey...Bec is scraping off a queen bee cell....you don't want those if you have a queen.

On another note it's Halloween tonight which doesn't have much meaning for lots of Aussies....but most kids seem to be into anything that gets them a big bag of lollies...we had quite a few knocking on the door and collecting their treats.....my fluffy girls thought they would get into the action..!!!

These two are all set for Halloween.......actually we all had  spaghetti bol  for dinner ....they love it

Happy Halloween if you are a devotee....but if like us you think it is just another excuse for people to fall into the trap of unwanted consumerism....it doesn't hurt to  dish out treats to entertain kids. !!