2011-02-05: Bee Inspection in the Big Snow

Several weeks ago I managed to get out to the hive using snow shoes (much easier than digging a path through the two + feet of snow). The snow was so deep that it was covering up over half of the hive. Again I felt thankful that I had added a top entrance to the hive while winterizing.

 

While it was hovering around freezing, the sun was strong and it was warming the tar paper around the hive so that it was warm to the touch. This was apparently enough incentive to convince the hive it was worth sending out a few scouts on the off chance something somewhere was blooming. I found several of these scouts around the hive at the bottom of funnel shaped holes in the snow that they had made after they had fallen on the snow surface and their attempts at flying had pushed aside the very light snow and caused them to drill into the snow. I found one that was still alive and I removed her and placed her on the hive, while several of her sisters took off inches from my ear. She sat on the hive for a while before flying off again into the cold. While her actions might seem stupid (and certainly humans probably have more brain matter dedicated to telling us the current status of our big toes than bees have in total), her actions are the expression of the will of the hive rather than the individual. And in this case the hive thought it was worth the loss of a few individuals (out of tens of thousands) if there was the possibility, no matter how small, of securing an early food source.

 

 

I cleared out some snow from around the hive to aid air getting to the bottom. I thought I could hear the swarm as I put my ear to the side of the hive. One day I should get a stethoscope.