ANTSTORE World of Ants

[Jake]

Adam James, Thanks for sharing your bee hive with us! It's an interesting read! I hope your hive does well and your new queen is accepted!

[JimmyVe]

Looks really great Adam. Good job with your bee's.

[SteveUK28]

Looking very good Adam, glad they are doing well for you.. Please do keep us updated...
Also i was wondering.. how do you plan on hibernating them if they are indoors?

[adam james]

Hello Steve , the bees are in hibernation now and have built up a store of honey to see them throu the winter. The warm inside doesent seem to be harming them. The workers only fly on sunny days or when its not raining and the queen has considerably reduced her amount of laying so she wont suffer either. Funny thing is thou they are still bringing in loads of pollen and necter so there must be flowers about somwhere.

[SteveUK28]

Yes the climate change is very strange isnt it. i still have lots of flowers in my garden. In fact i was up my local castle the other day.. Last Wednesday i believe. And inside one of the walls there is a Honey Bee colony.. and they was all very active.. at least 50 or so bees around the nest entrance...

[adam james]

Fiday/19/12/08


The Honey bee colony are in winter hibernation and have been since september , Slowly the colony is reducing in size as workers die off. The queen is still laying in the middle of the group of bees which are now clustered into a loose group. New workers are being born and new eggs being laid but these are few. Collecting pollen and nector and producing honey has stopped completly and on warm days the bees come out to do cleansing flights to empty there waste then they come straight back in. Honey has been given by a feeding tube to keep them from starvation. The bees wait for febuary when the slightly increasing tempertures and early flowers mean pollen stocks and nector can increase and the queen will begin her full laying cycle and the colonys population can explode again.

This will be there second summer and most likely the queens last in my obsevation hive for when june comes the queen will produce anouther and will swarm with her sister workers to create a colony somwhere else. But two harsh months of unpredictable weather they need to get throu first so i wish my bees goodluck.

Adam

[MoPe]

What about your bees? Have they already awaken? How are they? And how tastes the honey you got?

[adam james]

Hello MoPe if you click on this link you will see my Honey bee diary and the latest updates. I did harvest some honey of them last year and it was lovely but the colony far to small to harvest anything now. viewtopic.php?f=28&t=7022



Regards

Adam

[MoPe]

Thank you, adam james.

In the far future i will hopefully also have some honey bee colony... I once saw a man that had such a colony on my vacation and i really was fascinated. The honey was so delicious... And aditionally the ants could participate in eating the honey, too. That would be a nice self-supporter system, right?

[Messorus]

Hello Adam
I with my father are thinking about getting honey bee colony. My grandfather was a beekeeper for several years, but now he is too old for this job, and my father isn´t talking to him...- long story..
My father bought me a book about honey beeses and I visited bee keeper in my village few times, for pollen or bee´s wax.... By reading of book about honey bees, and by talk with bee keepers I saw that this is really harder than ant keeping... On the end I made a deduction, that keeping of eusocial insect is harder than keeping of normall insects
How is your bee colony doing? Where are you hybernating them? Your set- up in terarium is nice, do you see them all of the time?

[JimmyVe]

Where did you buy your bees please?

Hello Highered , i got them of a freind of mine .

[JimmyVe]

Nice to hear they are doing good. Bring on the pictures.

[adam james]

Hello Messorus , Answering your questions , they are kept in my living room and because of this i do see them all the time. The colony has starting building up now and the queen is beginning to lay again.

Cheers Jimmy . Pictures will be available soon.


Adam

[Messorus]

Hello Messorus , Answering your questions , they are kept in my living room and because of this i do see them all the time. The colony has starting building up now and the queen is beginning to lay again.

Cheers Jimmy . Pictures will be available soon.


Adam

It´s shocking
I didn´t know that they can accept somethink like this.... My grand father was a bee keeper, my father knows a lot about it, I have one prof. book about bee keeping, but that they can be keept in terarium and in living room! WOW
Honey beeses don´t get real hybernation like other eusocial insects(in central Europe), they make ,,a bee cake" from their bodies like for example Eciton ants do, where are they walking and walking around the queen and her brood, and it make temperature in this ,,cake" around 25°C. Till this hebyrnating season- from October, November to January, February, the colony isn´t getting any food.... On the end of the season is colony making regulation, just some type of older or I don´t know which criteria it have, workers will be kept alive.... But I never heard about indoor hybernation... Cool!

[adam james]

Hello Messorus i just wanted to explain how bees hibernate as i think you may have misunderstood wot happens. Bees produce honey and wax thats all they make , Ive never heared of bee cake ??. They make wax cells and these are wot they store the pollen and honey in. The wax is made by six glands in the bees adomen and comes out like little white flakes. The bees do not fully hibernate , they form a ball around the queen and shiver this keeps the ball warm and in the middle it can be warm enought for the queen to lay a few eggs. During winter they use up the honey and pollen that has been stored. If the weather is extremly cold and last longer then normal then the whole colony starves. Mine are taking full advantage of the early warm weather and are now loaded with pollen.

Greetings

Adam