More Night Visitors

There were more rowdy night visitors at my beehive last night.

A group of raccoons ...

...who messed with my camera ...

...and befouled my yard.

Some night visitors

After a few months of neglecting my motion activated trail camera, I decided to set it up near the beehive again.  There were quite a few interesting visitors. 

A very unusually patterned skunk.  He appears to be somewhat alarmed by the infrared flash that was triggered by his movements.  Though mostly invisible, the IR flash does have a faint red glow. 

Its a tense few seconds while the skunk tries to figure out what is going on. 

Ten seconds later the skunk turns and heads off in another direction. 

The evening after the skunk passed through, a medium-sized raccoon walks by. 

A few hours later, a raccoon (possibly the same one from before), walks straight up to the entrance of the hive. 

Literally one second later, the raccoon is streaking away from the hive.  It wouldn't surprise me if one of the many bees that like to hang out around the entrance of a hive on warm nights stung this raccoon. 

An hour later, our friend the skunk returns. 

He doesn't seem to bother much with the hive and continues on his way. 

Honeybees: 2

The merciless war between the honeybee and bumblebee kingdoms has claimed yet another life.  As I inspected the honeybee hive last evening, I noticed a recently dumped bumblebee carcass below the hive entrance.  No doubt the bumblebee had forced its way into the hive only to find itself engulfed by masses of defending honeybees.  I've never witnessed honeybees when they've battled an invading insect, but I've read that when they can't sting the intruder they will engage in what is known as "balling."  The term "balling," in this context, has nothing to do with any of the slang and often vulgar definitions described in urbandictionary.com.  Rather, in the case of honeybees, "balling" describes an attack in which a group of honeybees forms a tight cluster or "ball" around an intruder and, by collectively vibrating their wing muscles, generate enough body heat to literally cook the intruder to death.

The bee balling phenomena is well documented in science and there are many detailed descriptions of it on the Internet.  One BBC news report I found includes a thermal image of balling, which does a good job of showing the incredible heat being generated. 

Collective behavior in nature has always intrigued me and honeybees exhibit a lot of it.  One such collective behavior, which I particularly enjoy watching, is called "fanning."  If the hive has gotten too warm from the summer heat, or the bees are evaporating nectar to make honey, or they detect smoke from my smoker, a number of them will stand on the wax comb with their rears stretched high into the air and rapidly beat their wings to create an airflow over that portion of the hive.  When enough bees start fanning in the top bar hive (usually when the have is getting too warm), it can actually produce a weak flow of warm air that I can feel blowing against my hand if I place it up to one of the entrance holes.  All of this collective fanning produces a soft, distinctively pitched "hum" sound, which, reminds me (very vaguely) of the harmonics produced by Tuvan throat singing (if very small people were doing it).  For those of you who have never heard of Tuvan throat singing here is one example, though, the more I listen to this example, the less it seems like the bees.  Nonetheless it's an interesting video.

Anyway, returning to bee balling. Bees are very fastidious creatures, so, after the intruder has been killed several bees, known as "undertaker bees," will work for as long as it takes to drag the dead intruder across the hive floor and dump it outside the nearest entrance hole. 

Bumblebees vs. Honey Bees, 1:1

Today I noticed a dead bumblebee resting on the bottom screen of my beehive.  Several bees were clustered around it trying to move it towards the hive entrance.  It appears that it had forced its way through the entrance and was then killed.  Now the score is even: bumblebees 1, honey bees 1.

Over the past week, I've been able to work through most of the bugs I've encountered setting up my RBPi.  There was a whole host of issues that I had to work through, but everything seems to be working well and is nearly ready to be moved out to the beehive.  All I need to do now is to work on weatherproofing.  

Very Busy Bees and Some Odd Behavior

The bees are very busy today and I'm not entirely sure why.  It could be the temperature.  It got near 90 degrees Fahrenheit today, but its gotten near 90 on other days, so I'm skeptical  that this is the only cause.  Perhaps it's the upcoming severe weather the US National Weather Service is predicting for the eastern states (i.e. derecho). 

In the above video, you can see the bees streaming in and out the of hive entrance holes.  You can also see, slightly out of focus, several younger bees doing what is called "washboarding."  When they washboard on my hive, the bees will line up in rows on the hive's exterior surface near the entrance.  There, usually facing towards the ground, they will move diligently forward and backward with what looks like a scrubbing motion.  See the video below for a better shot. 

 
In the midst of all this honey bee activity, I also noticed several bumblebees flying around the hive.  I assume that they could smell the honey being produced in the hive and were looking for an opportunity to steal some .  It was while I was watching the bumblebees, however, that I noticed an unusual behavior.  During the it's snooping around the hive, one of the bumblebees suddenly grabbed one of the many drones loitering in front of the hive.  The two fell to the ground in a buzzing tangle, and, although he briefly tried to resist, the drone was soon dead.  At this point I expected the bumblebee to leave the dead drone, but, instead, she flew him up to a nearby bush and continued to hold on to him.  I managed to take a photograph of the bumblebee (below).  From looking at the enlarged photograph, the only thing I can guess is that the bumblebee is trying to extract honey from the drone, which he probably does contain in small amounts. 

The recently killed honey bee drone after he was killed by the much larger bumblebee. 

I have read of cases in which bees will eat through the bases of flowers to extract the nectar within, but I've never heard of bees eating through other bees to extract honey. 

Sensor update

For those of you who may doubt my follow-through on my projects, I have not forgotten about the sensor installation project.  Because the humidity sensor requires some extra supporting circuitry, I had to order some additional components (i.e. 555 ICs, various resistors, etc).  I just received them the other day an hope to start printing the circuits soon.

In the mean time I've been working on the Raspberry Pi end of this project.  To make the RBPi fullfill my vision for the beehive sensor array, I will want to eventually make it: 1) be remotely accessible through a secure interface, 2) be wirelessly connected to my router, and 3) make it solar powered.  Thus far, I've reformatted my RBPi twice: once with Pidora and the second time with Wheezy.  Pidora, which is based on Fedora, was nice, but it doesn't seem to be as well developed as the Wheezy interface, which is Debian.  My specific problem with Pidora is that I couldn't find gnome-panel and gnome-forgotthenameof to get vncviewer working, couldn't find ffmpeg, and couldn't find a wireless RT5370 driver.  I'm sure that someone with a little more talent and perseverance could find or adapt the necessary rpms, but I haven't had many good experiences with that approach.  Anyway, none  of these seemed to be available in the RB Pi compatible repos.  With Wheezy, I've been able get the wireless driver (objective #2) and ffmpeg installed and I'm currently working on vnc.  Hopefully I'll be done with this soon as the weather is too nice now to be stuck inside staring at a computer. 

For the first objective, I've pretty much gotten the secure remote access setup by, first establishing a ssh connection through my router via:

 ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 RBPiusername@myIP

- fyi my external IP address frequently changes so, I'll periodically have to update it using: curl smart-ip.net/myip

After I enter the user password for my RBPi, I have direct access to the machine's virtual terminal.  Once I get a vnc interface installed on the RBPi, I should then be able to check #1 off my list of my objectives. 

 As a part of this project, I also want to have a video camera in the hive.  For the camera I have an small Logitech external usb webcam that I bought about five years ago.  I no longer use it (my laptop now has one embedded), so I removed the outer covering to see what my options are for integration with the computer.  Since RBPi comes with two usb drives and there didn't seem to be any simpler connection method available, it will be easiest to just connect the webcam via usb.  However, I did find that optics did have the option for physically adjusting the focal range.  Testing it out, I found that I could adjust a very sharp focus from a few centimeters out to infinity.  I will no doubt use this feature to make adjustments when I install the camera. 

As I finish this entry, I'm currently trying to install "cheese," which is a package designed to operate most webcams.  Will update when I have more to report. 

Melter update

First glance into the melter after being left in the sun for a few hours today.  What the heck is that dark colored stuff? 

Much of it appears to have melted and dripped through the paper towel.  I'm not sure what the residue is. 

Upon closer inspection, it appears that half of the wax dripped through and half soaked into the paper towel.  Darn! 

Wax melter

Just created a wax melter for under ten dollars based on a design discussed in a blog entitled "Linda's Bees."  Excellent blog Linda.  Here's a photo of my wax melter. 

It's basically just a styrofoam cooler painted black on the inside with a sheet of glass on top.  A plastic container partially filled with water and a paper towel suspended over the top is placed inside the cooler.  The wax is placed on top of the paper towel.  I'll put it in the sun tomorrow and see how well it works.