The one on the left is Athena, the one in the middle is Persephone, the one on the right is Daphne. Not sure why but Isaac and I thought it would be fun to name them after Greek or Roman goddesses.
In any case we have been inspecting them each weekend to see how they are doing and it seems they are doing ok. We noticed that Persephone is not doing as well at the other two. It just was not growing at the same rate as Athena and they were started at the same time.
I went out and watched them for awhile and noticed a strange occurrence. I watched as one bee grabbed another bee trying to enter the hive and started to wrestle with it. Odd. Do bees wrestle? Hmmmmm....
Later in the week Isaac came in after watching the hives and noticed a number of dead bees at the entrance of Persephone. After some research we came to the conclusion that there was honey robbing going on!! Oh no..what do we do???
Okay, so here is what is going on. It seems that Persephone is a little on the weak side as hives go. Some feral hive has found them and has been going in and stealing honey. Which seems to be easier than going out and just gathering nectar. (lazy jerks). Well each hive has a set of guard bees at the entrance of the hive to inspect each bee to make sure it belongs to the hive. It if is not, then the guard bees wrestle with it and eventually kill it. This is the reason for the dead bees on the ground in front of P. (Spelling out Persephone is a pain) We were not sure what to do but we found a solution and may have stopped the robbing.
What we need to do is make the entrance a little smaller to allow the guard bees to inspect each bee as it comes in. So we stuffed some paper towels in the entrance to reduce the size to about half. Here is a photo of P with a stuffed entrance.
It seems to have cured the problem. We are going to do an inspection soon and we'll see how everybody is doing.
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