Trapped Above
I checked on the Italian hive yesterday and found that I had actually trapped the queen above where I wanted her. She's laying in the honey supers while the brood box is missing eggs. On the plus side, she suddenly got alot more room to lay, leading to more bees...and eventually, more honey. The bees were oddly aggresseive yesterday. I left the top super(containg nothing but foundation) and the queen excluder off then was recruited by my Dad, the second I finished, to mow the lawn. I got about a third of the way through then, suddenly, about half a dozen (6) bees just started headbutting me. For those of you who don't know, "head-butting" is when the bees are angery and ram the source of their anger in the face...me. This is usually one step before stinging and can accidentally enter the nasal and oral cavities as well as the ears and eyes. Not nice places to be stung. I did get stung in the ankle through the sock by one determined bee. The pain passed in about 5 minutes but, with the weight of walking it did get more intense. Then, my mother, weeding, got stung in the scalp. In the pain scale that's just one step below the tounge. They seemed to "cool their tempers" by the next day but, the fact that they were still aroused after an hour leads me to beleive that I must have screwed up somewhere in the inspection. I was carfull and didn't roll any so I don't know what went wrong.
2 Comments:
Wow! under the tongue huh?
You should draw up a numbered pain scale diagram.
Yeah...at least that's what some other beekeepers claim. They say they got stung there by eating the honey in the burr comb while doing inspections. There was appearantly still a bee on that comb.
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