Thursday, December 31, 2009

Bees in California, the Winter of 2009-10


This is my niece's hive and Nutcracker/Beekeeper, a perfect beekeeper Christmas decoration.. They live in the hills above Oakland, CA so the bees are still snuggled in for the winter. You will find her blog at Wonderfarm. With the normal wetter and colder weather in No Cal she has not posted much on bees for a while but there are older posts about the arrival and installation of her hive. This time of the year we all search for things to post.



In Southern CA there almost always a bee season, even though some claim a dearth this time of the year, given a chance the bees find something to harvest. This may be New Years to the two legs but it is just another work day for the Twitchy Bees. They just keep on working. This video is a normal day for the Twitchers. This video was shot around noon on a semi-sunny day. The same rate of activity occurs on most days with decent weather. They are usually out well before 7AM PT, the earliest I have checked. They keep this up until dusk. About 3P each day things get even more active when the the Orientation flights occur daily. Thanks to my Secret Santa I got a Flip Video camera for Christmas which I used to shoot this particular video.. It is very easy to work but I have to learn a couple extra steps to get the videos to upload to Blogger.
In another week or so I plan to make an extensive examination of the hive. With the Flip Video Camer and the Canon Rebel EOS Digital 35mm I also received you can be sure there will be more and much abetter pictures for the Blog.

Happy New Year and may the Bees be with you.

3 comments:

Cliff W said...

Excellent. Cool video and great to see your bees looking so well. Our bees in Ireland have been wrapped up for weeks away from the harsh elements. Happy 2010

Dennis In The Dale said...

Great weather here, mid 60s - low 70s F. The bees love it. I want to go and get better pictures and inspect the hive but I need to line up some help for that.

patricia said...

Hey, my bees most certainly aren't snuggled in for the winter! They're by-the-bay bees and they're quite busy on sunny days. I've got a lot of rosemary blooming, and they love that.

I even opened the hive up one sunny day last week. It might not have been the best time to do it, but an inspection was overdue. It was odd not too see eggs and larvae at this time of year, but I saw the Queen Bee-atrice wandering around, and all seemed to be well.