We all heard about Wilma, right? Anyways, she came and went and was a hick-up compared to Francis. Nothing really interesting or scary even happend. Around here there was no flooding, no real wind damage and the house didn't even lose power! I know that just 100 miles to the south it was terrable but, we didn't feel any of that here. Anyways, I prepared for the worst. I tied down the hive and weighted the top of the smaller colony.
I wasn't too worried about the one here given it was so heavy. Around 5:00am the winds reached their highest with sustained 40 M.P.H. and gusts up to 60 M.P.H. At this point I was worried about the smaller hive but, the weather was too inclement to go check on it. I waited through the day either by staring at the large hive throught the window or reading up some more on bees. Eventually, the hurrican passes and, to my surprise, the temperature dropped from the mid eightys to the upper sixties. It got cold and, believe it or not, my bees went into a winter cluster and I think expelled some drones. I could see that the large colony here was about 500 bees smaller as it looks like the beird was blown down into a puddle. While that's no problem at all, it still isn't nice to see drowned bees. The weather passes around 9:00am and I went out to check on the smaller hive at about noon. As you can imagine, I became very concerned when I saw this:
an empty enterence. So, like an idiot I stuck the camera under the hive and took a photo.
Take special notice to the fact that there are bees OUTSIDE the screen and were seperated from my hand by about 1/2 inch. Oh, and, one more thing, before I closed up the hive I did a quick inspection and someone wanted to take some photos of me in my new bee suit.
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