Attack of the Ants!

A big storm with some tornadoes swept over the area today. I decided to go check on the bees to make sure that the hives did not get blown off.
Good thing that I did! There was no wind damage but ants moved into the Warre hive. The heavy rains must have disturbed them and they decided to move to higher ground. Our hive seemed like good place. They set camp between the lid and the quilt box.





They also invaded the bottom hive.





That is one disadvantage of the Warre hive. The main Bee population lives in the top hive leaving the entrance unguarded at night.
I cleaned out the ant nest and placed entire hive into a tub filled with water to prevent further invasions.
Hopefully the bees will get rid of the rest of uninvited guests tomorrow morning when they start using the bottom hive.
The few guard bees were fighting valiant but loosing battle with the ants

Video of the fight

The Bees are busy

The bees are in full swing. All hives are humming with activity. The established hives have neverending stream of workers leaving and coming. The Warre bees are busy building the top bar comb. The have built up the comb from all top bars in the top hive in only a week! Amazing. The queenless hive seems to be diing fine as well. There is an activity at the entrance, so hopefully they have started a new queen already. The flow is strong and there seem to be plenty of pollen as well. Bees are arriving LOADED. Check out the Slo Mo video below. (Captured at 60fps and played back at 0.15 speed)

Warre hive is settled

Bees have settled in the Warre hive. They all moved to the top hive in the morning and started working on the comb strips I set up for them.
Even the hive I transferred bees from is still showing activity, although much less than other hives.
This is an experiment in the power of nature.
We have 4 hives in the yard.
The Warre, that has no comb but strong colony with a queen transferred into it. That would be like if bees settled new tree hollow in the wild.
The second hive is full of comb with brood, pollen and honey, but very few bees left. We hope that they will be able to raise new queen. This hive has least chance of survival.
Third hive is a control, new colony installed at the same time as the Warre. I just added a super to it to give them room to grow and to prevent swarming.
The fourth hive is a strong colony we started last year. They are in full swing collecting nectar flow.

Transferring bees into Warre hive

Today is the day. We will be transferring bees from a new colony we jsut purchased into our first Warre hive. The plan is simple, take bees from each frame and shake them into the Warre. Pay attention to the queen and make sure she goes into the hive. The Warre has only two boxes each with wax foundation strips attached to the top bars to help girls start building their new home. Here is how the transfer went.

Preparing the Warre hive

Today we brought our new Warre hive to the bee yard and set it up
One thing we wanted to do was to add wax foundation strips to the top bars to help bees settle in their new home.
I melted some bees wax and used it to glue strips of pure wax foundation to the Warre top bars