{"id":19797,"date":"2018-09-27T09:30:41","date_gmt":"2018-09-27T13:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/?p=19797"},"modified":"2018-09-27T09:50:56","modified_gmt":"2018-09-27T13:50:56","slug":"red-hands-with-missing-fingers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/archives\/19797","title":{"rendered":"Red hands with missing fingers"},"content":{"rendered":"

As noted in the post below, I zipped back home from the salt marsh last Friday to take care of some loose ends, One of the things on the to-do list was replenishing the bee feeder with more sugar syrup. A bit of backstory: I didn’t keep bees last year – my hives were winter-killed and I missed the windows for ordering replacement packages in the spring. This year, with plans for the Big Bike Trip well underway, it made no sense to start beekeeping again, so I didn’t. But I did leave a hive out in the back yard the past couple years, mainly because I’m lazy that way. Come early August, I noticed some bee activity in and around the hive. “Checking it out to see if they can scavenge some supplies.”, thought I. But they stuck around! I gave them a few weeks to get settled in, then did an inspection. Capped brood<\/a> (iow, the hive is making new members)! A second inspection and hey! there’s the queen<\/a>! At this point I realized I needed to start feeding them if there was going to be any chance of them surviving the winter. I’m not big on feeding hives; sugar syrup provides calories, but precious little else. But, just as, given a choice between Soylent\u00a0(vc)<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0and starving to death, I’ll happily consume the sludge, so too will I choose syrup over losing a nice gentle hive with what I am guessing is a wild-bred queen. They’d been going through a quart of syrup<\/a> every two days, so I expected to find the feeder empty. I did not expect this:<\/p>\n

\"trashed<\/a>