Lifting the Lid on things

I was home tonight, so it was the first chance to video our beehive in "action". I was home just in time to see a handful of baby workers heading out and back to the fields before they settled down for the night. 

Earlier in the day BCW had managed to catch a picture of a worker flying into the box.

worker bee entering nest box

Tonight we had to do a few things:

• check the one-way flap into the box as we had seen bees trying to use it and apparently not succeeding
• level the box properly with a spirit level to ensure there were no issues with the internal sugar water supply
• insert a small thermometer so we can check the internal temperature of the box

Here's a video from when we took the lid off:

We were as quick and delicate as possible, conscious that the box would be cooling off with the lid off. I took the thermometer from our front nestbox for the timebeing and inserted the probe through the lid. 

When we replaced the box and opened the entrance we were amazed and delighted to see a single junior worker bee come out and inspect the lid! Brilliant! Here's the video of it doing so:

I can't believe how small the worker bees are - they are really tiny - the small ones only about 1 cm in length. We saw one resting on the wall earlier in the evening, warming up (the wall was well over 20 degrees C while the ambient temperature was about 14C).

My mind is already working overtime about how we are going to get a camera in this box, safely and with minimal anxiety to the bees. I'm thinking I'll have to do some kind of trial run too, to run through the basic moves and recovery plan if something goes wrong! 

It's a bit like a bank job in miniature!