Under Attack...

So as I mentioned in the last post about the bees, we had a couple of niggling concerns about ants creeping up onto the hive.  We decided to cast these doubts aside after a conversation about who would win in a fight? A bee or an ant?  We decided that a bee would definitely win having a stinger, the advantage of flight and everything.... wrong.  According to trusty google, an ant colony can destroy a hive in under two hours removing all the honey, wax and brood and generally clearing the whole place out. I cant remeber if they actually eat bees or not or if they just flee the hive. Bees cant sting ants seemingly and ants are very determined (as we know from the leaf-cutter fiasco a couple of years ago now).

Thinking that our analysis of the situation was accurate, we didnt even bother to check on the hive for about a week, until on a boring afternoon in the hostel, I googled it to dicover the bad news.  That night when we got home from work, we went down to check on the hive with a torch in the dark and found what we were most dreading.  The hive was absolutely covered in big black ants!  Some with wings even, voiding our advantage of flight theory. There was no buzing coming from the hive and there were no guard bees patroling the entrance as there usually are - just thousands of ants racing around all over the place.

Thouroughly depressed, we half-heartedly tried out a googled suggestion of covering the hive in powdered cinnamon and brushed off as many ants as we could in the darkness and left it at that. After the considerable investment involved in setting up the hive, getting the kit and studying the system, it was a bit of a blow to think that we had failed as beginner bee-keepers.

As the following day was Saturday, Tony went down to the hen house to get eggs for breakfast and at the same time went to check if the cinammon had had any effect on getting rid of the ants, making it easier to salvage the hive to start again.  It had!  It´s true that ants really dont like cinnamon, I read that it burns their feet. Whatever it does, they left... But better than that!  There were bees everywhere, zipping in and out of the hive, legs covered in pollen! Maybe it was the case that they lock down when under attack and seal up the entrances or maybe they were all asleep and not buzzing the night before.  Whatever the reason, it was a great relief to see them!  We also checked on the progress that day too and they are working very hard and have made a lot of honeycomb on the new panels that we put in only a week earlier. We´re still not sure exactly when we´ll have honey on the go but we´re happy enough for now just knowing that the ants didnt manage to raid our supply!