It's really neat to have been offered to come and remove an owl house in Austin that has lots of bees in the box. Saturday night I will go and look at what I am dealing with. I suspect it is full of honey and full of bees as it's been since spring when the bees moved in. This was Wednesday
I got a call from my neighbor across the street today Thursday. He asked if I was interested in some free wood. He's trying to clean up some of his construction pile. Sure, I will take it because I have some projects I have in mind. I go out and start moving the wood to my property with him helping too. I get to talking about bees and how they're doing. I mentioned I got a call from a guy in town that has an owl house full of bees. "I have an owl house". I wanted to look at it and so he showed me. He hadn't looked at it in 5 yrs probably.
Surprise I saw a bee come out. I saw another and then saw them at the entrance. It's hardly any traffic, none the less it's an old bee hive that was built up and swarmed. Some bees found it and now are making a home out of it.
From what I can tell it's probably 500 maybe a 1000 bees. Were in the backside of summer and the bees are weak. I was looking at the comb and nothing was in it. The abdomens of the bees are thin. With so few bees I hope I can get them started on sugar water to get them going.
My plan is to leave them until the spring time when they get strong again. I think the queen isn't laying because the bees are so few and not anything to eat. The bee hive is in the trees shaded with about 7 feet off the ground. When the bees get healthy I will do a removal and gift them to my neighbor if he wants them in a bee hive. Currently they're so far away from anything nothing is going to be bothered even if they get big. It's at the back end of the property. A ranch is on the other side, so it's great. Fall is coming, so hopefully we'll have a nectar flow for this small hive to gain some strength and numbers.
The other bee hive, I probably will put it in a Nuc box and winter them in it.
I'm pretty excited to get another bee hive going. Weather here for the winter we don't get snow that sticks to the ground more then 1 to 3 days. We only get snow about every 3rd year.
Zak
Liberty Hill, Texas USA
That seems like not many bees to make it through the winter but I only know about northern climates so maybe you can feed them through the winter. At the very least you'll learn something useful you can share with the rest of us. Good luck to you.
ReplyDeleteWinter weather here in Central Texas would be laughable if you came down here. What is cold to us is probably Fall weather to y'all in the northern states. Sure we get down to low 20's for a few days and up to 30 during the day, but that's just for a few days or maybe a week of cold. We then get the southern wind that pushes north off the Gulf of Mexico and we rebound back into the 40's and 50's sometimes into the 60's and 70's. We have wild fluctuation because of the frontal boundary's that dip south into Texas, but retreat nearly as fast as they came. Only in February is it really cold that I can tell you where we get a few days or 5 days in the 20's and 30's. Cold frigid days from Arctic cold air mass that push south do not stay for long.
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