The Business of Bees, Part 111

摘要

To fuel the side addictions of birds and bees, most people do have to have a real job. I'm still waiting to win the lottery so I can start a farm of pygmy goats and mini-attack donkeys and emus, but since I don't play it might be awhile. In the meantime, I feed the hobby with some fairly intense honey bee research. It can be a lot, but there's no denying the education that comes with full immersion into something different, whether it be a foreign language or bees. As of last year, Bobby and I together reached the threshold of completing Colony Condition Assessments (CCAs) on over 10,000 colonies. This is where we go through each hive and record the percent coverage of adult bees on both sides of the frame, then record the percent coverage of honey,nectar, bee bread, capped brood, open brood, eggs, and empty cells. This goes down to percentages of five, and must be done for every frame in the colony, whether it be 20 frame sides for a single deep, or 80 frame sides for a quad. You can learn a lotabout bees with that sort of in-your-face work, but what it doesn't tell you is the background noise ofrunning a business.