Let it rain?

[oloriel]

Seems that the weather warning was correct after all - we were promised heavy thunderstorms before 1 pm, and just now the sky has gone that peculiar sort of dark-but-not-dark you get before a storm on mid-day in Summer. It's gone extremely windy, too, which is a pleasure in this heat and looks rather spectacular from the attic (where I went to close the windows). Massive lightning front heading our way.

I just hope it won't be anything to topple over my hives!

Speaking of the hives: I gave the red hive a new frame today. At first I didn't think it was necessary since they had only started to use one side of the "old" new frame, but a closer look revealed that the as-yet-unnamed red queen had laid eggs in every single comb on the assumedly empty side. No wonder the red workers have started to build honey combs randomly on top of the old frames, they had no room otherwise with all that breeding! I hadn't expected them to be that productive in such a short time - the blue hive isn't, even though it started out so much more numerous (by now it looks about even, but the blue hive doesn't breed and harvest nearly as much). But then the honeybees don't have much competition in this valley - just a few bumblebees and wild bees - and there are a lot of flowers, not to mention the forests around. Before they had to make do with what they could find in the university gardens at Bochum. Which may explain the discrepancy between expectations and reality, really...

At any rate, they have an additional wall-frame now and I hope they'll get the hint and stop building combs where they get destroyed whenever I have to check on them. Even though it was fun to watch - the combs were right between the (wooden) frames and the see-through plastic sheet, so I could see exactly how they were built and filled...

Right. Off the computer, in case that thunderstorm finally decides to hit! (Please bring rain, kthx?)