Month: april 2014

In my last post I estimated that it takes more than 300000 trips to collect 1.6 kg. This was under the assumption that one bee takes home about 5 mg. Doing a bit of internet searching I found that this was a somewhat low estimate :o) Mythbusters have an episode called “1000 Bees” where they test the lifting capability of one bee. They find that the bee could lift 96 mg. Since the mass of the bees was 118 mg it could in fact lift 81% of it own weight. The estimated 5 mg already seems a bit low…. Then I found an useful post on www.quora.com: How much can […]

Wow, as I ended my last weighing the hive post, I was just waiting for a few days warm weather for something to happen. The weather has been great for the past 3 days and now things are happening :o) The total weight of the hive (corrected for the second box added 3 days ago) look like this. It is clear that the hive is finally gaining significant weight. It is actually so heavy that lifting it with my suitcase scale has become problematic since lift it with fairly straight arms above elbow level :o). Remember that the straight line is the weight loss during the winter months when the […]

Today (17th of april) I did a check on the hive since yesterday I did my last weighing and the result was odd – or at least not as I expected. I was expecting the mass of the hive to steadily increase (weight loss to be negative) but to my surprise the hive was loosing weight again. But when I opened the hive the reason became clear. First of all there was bees everywhere. Last year I counted how many “aisles” were filled with bees (you count the spaces between the plates, and with 10 plates and ends counting as ½ you have max 10 aisles per box). No need […]

Yesterday (Sunday 6th April), while cleaning the house after the baptism which took so long time with the children being bored or crying etc, I did another weighing of the hive during a break – and this is how it looks: Total mass show a slight increase in weight The increase does not look that significant but when looking at the weight change per day the the change look much more significant. Here it is quite obvious that the hive is gaining weight. This means that the bees now have significant amounts of nectar and pollen available to sustain the hive, i.e. the summer started in week 14.