I would like to check if this is normal behaviour
Activity at the Entrance of the new Top Bar Hive. Recorded on 20 June 2015... Time 14:00. Location Sydney Australia
It was starting to get dark so the majority of the bees were coming home from a hard days work. A little Traffic builds up everyday around this time when the bees are returning. This goes on for about 10 minutes then things settle down for the night.
Temperatures here at the moment are 15-20C in the day and down to about 6C at night. It happens everyday at about the same time I don't see fighting and most of them seem to be going in there is plenty of space a the entrance is 7" or 178 mm long and about a little over 0.4 inch or 10 mm high
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ei78C8J3-U (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ei78C8J3-U)
It's orientation flights, notice how the bees are making a S shaped flight. Robbers are more side to side and in/out.
Ya, they do that at the 1400/1500 hours range.
Wow so they do these flights late in the day? I thought they do it in the morning before heading off ? So all those bees were born at about the same time ?
When my hives have an orientation flight it looks like a small swarm starting to form around and just above the hive and last up to about 1/2 hour any time of the day. Robbing looks like your pattern and goes for hours. If I can't tell I will close the hive after dark and the next day watch and if there are bees trying to get in the hive I then know that they are robber bees.
Might be the hive gets a little stuffy that time of day and they get out to stir the air in front of it. I've seen em do that on really hot days.
Orientation it is.... if you look you can usually see as some drift farther away as they imprint their location. Can happen any time of day but I imagine summer heat will affect the time of day also.
Orientation flights. Watch the bees flying out from the hive. They are looking at the entrance and flying in bigger and bigger circles out from the hives. .
I did not think that so many bees would be taking so many orientation flights and they would have learned the hive location already.
I have not opened the hive for about 3 weeks This means there must be lots of young bees at least 14 days old ?
As its winter here does that mean the queen is still laying ? I would have to confirm that with seeing larvae. Maybe on a warm day ill take a peek.
The bees doing the orientation flights are probably close to 21 days old from hatching, 42 days from being being a freshly laid egg. Tomorrow most of them will bee in the field.
Jim