Okay, sorry for the headline there. It was finally time for us to take the separator out of the top bar hive. It keeps the package of bees we installed in spring occupied with the first part of the box so they don't live like college students or create a chaotic honey bee hoarder palace. But then once they've had a chance to get things going, they need some room or they'll swarm.
Which isn't as dramatic as it sounds, though it is a loss if you're trying to keep that colony of bees going. When bees swarm, they don't attach folks or anything like that, they just go set up housekeeping elsewhere. We needed to remove the tin foil barrier so they wouldn't run away from home.
Which is where the headline came in. Back when I had TV, there were a lot of shows on where they remodeled (usually actually rebuilt) people's houses. This might still be a thing, I don't know, but the tradeoff people made to be on the show was make yourself the object of pity for a national TV audience, we'll give you a house you can't afford the taxes on and leave you the financial equivalent of a stoker on a tandem bike going up hill when the captain jumps off and shouts 'have fun!'
If you didn't know, television is full of these little gems, it's why I can't watch the Royals play Minnesota right now, something I'd really like to do actually. Too much poison comes along with the trace of content I care for. We're up 4-1 as I write this, poised to win three in a row against the team we just reclaimed first place in the division from. If the rest of TV didn't suck so hard, I could be watching instead of looking at updates on my phone.
I digress. Holy cow, I need to get to bed anyway, riding to work tomorrow. Patrick came over and it was really a quickie deal, even he seemed impressed at how easy it went. No need to smoke the girls, just lift the lid, pull the divider, put the blank bars back in place, close up. It took about ten minutes tops. Once again the top bar hive seems to be so, so much less hassle than the Langstroth hives I kept umpteen years back. And now the girls have the equivalent of a huge home addition, we just took their two bedroom and made it a six.
It occurred to me the bees might almost be too much of a good thing. The apricot tree has always put on a lot of fruit, but this year it's branches are literally sagging to the ground with the weight.
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