Home, I'm Honey!
Sunday, May 1, 2011 at 11:51PM Today I also made a slight modification to the nestbox in the back garden to bring it up to a similar standard to the front nestbox.
The changes/modifcations were as follows:
- change internal tubing
- add internal remote thermometer
- add small capsule of honey-water (having seen this consumed with great gusto in the front nestbox by BB33)
The tubing change consisted of:
- changing to white tubing from black to allow a little more light/translucency into the box
- curving the tube to send the bee into the main body of the box
- creating a hole in the tube below the camera so that we can positively confirm seeing the bee enter and exit the box
The box layout now looks like this:
new layout of rear nestboxYou can see the obvious new tubing layout and in the bottom right you can see the pen-lid filled with honey water. It is just gaffer-taped to the side of the box, which has proven to be a wholly adequate technique. The thermometer sensor is in the top right of the picture and runs to an external display unit a meter away. This LCD unit is actually suitable for embedding in a device or surface, so I may come up with some further ideas on where/how to mount it, if not in the box itself (e.g. it could be embedded in the box lid.)
We got chance to test the latest incarnation of the box out when I caught a bufftail (BB34) in the afternoon.
Bb34 - Bufftail - rear nestbox
The new tubing system worked a treat and we could easily see her enter and leave the box. She went in the box for about an hour. She was quite placid with some mooching around and cleaning behaviour. Then after an hour she left of her own accord.
She didn't attempt to try the honey-water, so she obviously had other things to be getting on with!
bee34, bufftail, honey water, layout, nestbox, temperature, thermometer, tube in diary