Varroa Control - Drone Frame

As part of my varroa control strategy, if you can call it that, I inserted a drone frame into the brood chamber of my main hive, hive two. Drone take ~24 days to mature before emerging from the cell so the varroa are attracted to them. The extra 3 days increases the chances of another of the mother varroa's progeny reaching breeding age.

It wasn't fully capped but I didn't want the drone emerging and unleashing a flood of varroa on the hive. After removal I pulled 20 larvae and counted the mites on them. From this small sample I estimate that 1.5% of the drone brood where maturing while sharing a cell with a varroa mite family.

20 Drones, 3 female varroa

The chickens enjoyed eating the brood. Its not great for the bees because the chickens break the cells down so they have to be redrawn but I know none of the drones or their parasites survived.

The photo below shows a mother varroa mite and her male offspring. The male usually remain in the cell and have a very soft body. I'm guessing they don't like the sun either. This one is making a dash for the shadow on the tip of my thumb, under the larva.

My plan from here, once the new queen has begun laying, is to reinsert the drone frame and give the bees a month or so to repair the damage the chickens have done. By this stage there should be another frame of sacrificial victims so remove. I'll perform the same count and see how the numbers compare. I also need to put a sticky board under the hive and see what the natural mite fall is.

Nuc and a swarm

It appears that when I made up my latest nuc I didn't select the brood frame very well. Around midday Saturday I noticed a lot of bee activity around a Kowhai tree in the natives corner. Closer inspection revealed a small swarm. I'd be surprised if this swarm lasted very long unaided especially given the cold nights we are having in Christchurch at present I set about collecting it.

A full inspected of the top bar hive yesterday had revealed no queen cells so the swarm can't have originated from there. The swarm looked too big to have originated from the nuc but that was the only option left. It seemed unlikely that some else's swarm had settled near my hives.

I'm always amazed at the bees ability to communicate. The Queen Substance must be a very strong smell for them. Whenever a swarm is knocked from its perch there is a lot of confusion, bees flying everywhere, but within a few minutes things calm down and the bees collect around the queen again. I placed a nuc box under the swarm, knocked them off and waited. It no time at all order replaced confusion and the majority of the bees were heading in the same direction, into the nuc box.

A queen, seconds after hatching

The nuc was well populated, prior to the swarm, to I took this to mean they wanted more space. I replaced the nuc box with a full depth super and transferred the remaining population, which was still significant, across. It didn't take long to confirm where the swarm had come from. The photo on the left clearly shows several supcedure cells. Most were ripped open but one was in tact. I cut it off and help the queen hatch. She then flew away so I don't know whether she survived or not.

A sheet of newspaper, then a half height box prepared the new hive more merger with the swarm. After dumping the swarm into the half height I slipped the lid on and left them to it. The queens will fight it out I suppose and since they are both new I have no opinion on which one would be better - may the best queen win.

Hexapod - The Brain

My intention for this robot has always been to use the PIC chips as the computing power. Each leg was to be controlled by its own processor that knows just enough to operate a leg according to the instructions it receives from the brain. The basic idea being that when I came to implement the control algorithms I wouldn't need to worry about the mechanics of moving a leg 'safely' or correctly because the leg controller wouldn't let the brain do anything 'dangerous'. This would simplify the control algorithms but I was still concerned I wouldn't be able to express the complexity I wanted in assembler or C without a lot of time and learning.

Scott Hanselman recently published a podcast about the .net micro framework. I'm very familiar with C# (a .net language) and the development environment as I've spent the bulk of the last 6 or 7 years of my professional life working with it. Visual Studio is, almost without a doubt, the best development environment currently available. The coding support and tools, the debugging and ease of use all contribute to making it a tool that allows you to focus on the problem at hand rather than tool.

The micro framework brings a powerful language and development environment to a very small platform. There is growing support for the micro framework in the market place with a large variety of devices. The platform I'm most interested in for this project is the Netduino, a derivative of the already popular Arduino.

The most attractive feature of this piece of hardware is the plug'n'play aspect. Everything I've seen so far indicates you plug in the USB cable, power it up, start Visual Studio and you're away. As I'm more about the software than the hardware this is very attractive.

My local Arduino supplier, Mindkits, has many Arduino parts (which are compatible with the Netduino) but doesn't supply the Netduino yet (although they are considering it). I have ordered one from Sparkfun which should arrive sometime next week.

My first experiment will be to see if I can get the Netduino to talk I2C to the PIC. Once that works I'll connect another PIC and see if it can talk to both PICs. With that done I'll be well on the way to have a mobile platform.

Top Bar Hive Populated, 3rd time lucky

Populating my top bar hive proved to be a bit of a challenge. A standard Langstroth frame wont fit so how to convince a large handful of bees to stay put was the question.

I seemed to have achieved it as part of the move of my main hive but it was a journey. My first few attempts failed but I've learned a few things.

My first attempt was doomed to fail and I knew it when I did it but I was interested to see how the bees reacted and they, as they often do, amazed me with their ability to communicate. I had a 4 frame nuc that had lost its queen. I'm guessing she didn't come back from a mating flight. I emptied all the bees out of the nuc into the top bar hive and blocked the entrance. Half a litre of syrup was provided to make them feel welcome and they seem to appreciate it. After a day I unblocked the entrance to see what would happen. I should point out at this point that I had left the nuc where it was and the top bar was sitting next to it.

Shortly after unblocking the entrance I thought there was a swarm starting (even though they had no queen...) but it appears they held a family meeting, decided they didn't like their new house and all together took off for their old house. In the less than five minutes the top bar hive was empty and nuc was full again. How they communicated the idea to everyone all at once I don't know but it was amazing to watch.

These of photos show the sequence of events.

Confusion	Found the wax
Clustering	Gone...

Once they had all arrived back in the nuc box I left them alone for a few weeks. I then prepared the main hive for merging the nuc and was about to move the frames across when I noticed some brood. I have no idea where the queen came from as this was several months after I had placed a queen cell into the nuc and there was definitely no brood previously. One old hand suggested I had struck it lucky by receiving a queen who got lost on her mating flight.

On my next attempt I took a couple of frames and cut a block out of them. I then heated some wax and used it to stick the cut outs to the top bar. The bees seemed quite happy with this arrangement and stayed put (queen and all). They would probably still be there now if I hadn't neglected them over winter. It appears they ran out of feed and so died out. They had made one small comb on a top bar, in the perfect position, so it's a shame they didn't survive.

My third attempt follows the plan I talked about before which seems to have worked. Brushing one brood frame of bees, the one with the queen on, looks to have been sufficient. I took this photo just a few minutes ago by removing some of the top bars at the far end of the hive and poking the camera in. You can see the container if syrup (which I keep topping up) sitting on the mesh at the bottom. The top bars are covered with some rubber carpet underlay and I could feel the heat rising out of the hive when I lifted it. I'm hoping that when I inspect them this weekend there is some brood or eggs and they have started some new comb.