Sweetcorn

I'm never quite sure what will grow in the Christchurch climate but I seem to be onto a winner with sweetcorn or maize. There's nothing quite like breaking a couple of ears off the stem, dropping it into a pot of boiling water and then serving it up, all in less than five minutes. Its very sweet, low maintenance and keeps the sun out of my son's bedroom during the day (a bit...).

I'm growing two varieties this year. The smaller one is Yates Honey Sweet, which we've had a few cobs from so far and it is very sweet. The taller one, which is over two meters high, is Red Yellow Maize from the Koanga Institute. The description says that 20% will be red and 80% yellow.

The ears can be eaten as sweetcorn when young or used to make polenta, porridge and bread when its a bit older. The color difference is quite stunning. The silk on the tops of the ears and the pollen bearing top are both quite different as can be seen in these photos.

Home made escape board - sort of

Having extracted a couple of supers of honey I had a few frames that needed drying off. I placed these on my home hive and tried to improvise an escape board. The theory was that if the bees movement between the hive and the wet supers was restricted they would 'rob' them and then leave them with almost no bees. Unfortunately I didn't put enough thought into it. It was fairly apparent it hadn't worked as soon as I cracked the supers away from the board.


Since I was using a flat piece of board there was no bee space on the bottom. The holes I drilled were up against the frames of the lower super and therefore blocked. I'm guessing it was very hot in the supers the next day because when I checked on them that evening there was a large number of dead bees.



A quick rethink and a much larger drill bit might have done the trick, I'll have to check on them tomorrow.

Queen Bee Graft Progress

There has been some progress on growing the new queens. Cells 1, 4 and 5 have been accepted by the bees. 2 and 3 have been cleaned out. Initially it appeared the bees had accepted all five, which would have been a record for me. The photo on the right was taken on the 1st of Feburary, one day after the graft.
There are bees clustered around all five cells. The photo on the left was taken on the 3rd, cells 2 and three being ignore. Looking back at the images of each graft I'd guess that #2 was rejected because it was quite dry and probably died while it was out of the hive and #3 was part way up the cell wall. The three that were accepted are all in plenty of royal jelly, something to look out for next time I suppose.

In this image the 4 - 5 day old grub can be seen, well surrounded in royal jelly and quite a lot larger than a worker.