Bees make sunshine.

This afternoon: 

The beeople are very busy right now. Hundreds of teen bees are coming out and hovering around setting their GPSes and learning their way home. It's bee weather: warm enough to sit outside delighting in the old bees bringing in saddlebags stuffed with various colours of pollen, and the fuzzy teen bees from the 3/4 hive are cuddled together watching along with me. 

The Flow hive teen bees are mostly heading inside to study for their exams (they don't call it swotting). There's a bee standing on the Flow landing board with her abdomen up and last segment smiling, wafting her pheromone haere mai. The bees rush in, one seems to have only pocketed a wee dab of pollen it was so responsive to the call. 

A big blunt-bottomed drone came out to orient himself too, poor haploid bludger crashed into a few things as he did so but made it home again. Some say they're a waste of space, others say their presence calms the hive; maybe they're the class clowns. I wonder where the local drones congregate to hang out, bumping each other and laughing, hoping to spurt and die their little deaths. Drones are fairly endearing sperm delivery mechanisms, and I suppose they do about the normal amount of housework as such things go. I wonder if the Queen names them and laughs about their daft urges. 

If I'm sitting watching the bees come and go, like I did this afternoon, it's always pleasant weather. So far, these are not pets which demand work in bad weather; we have scurried down to pour syrup in for them during drizzle and at night, but that's soon over. 

After the rain stopped and the bees started flying on the weekend, to test whether it was warm enough to look at the colonies inside our hives I went down to the bee coop in a fairly light top and rolled up my sleeves. When that proved comfortable, I lifted my shirt and considered whether it was comfortable to hang my gut out. It was, so Sean, Iris and I put on our beekeeping suits and Iris started the smoker. 

We discovered the 3/4 hive was pretty much full and so we sorted ourselves out to add a box the next day. The Flow hive is only growing about as fast as the descriptions of "normal nucs" I have found, so it's not ready yet. We wonder vaguely about this. Perhaps the 3/4 has more Carnica genes, perhaps there is Drift with Flow bees cruising into the 3/4 hive by accident, maybe it has something to do with the vast quantities of syrup the 3/4 hive has been sucking up.