Today Ryan and I are hanging in the back yard watching the bees and chillin’ and suddenly we notice that the bees seem agitated. So Ryan walks (limps) over there and he notices little black sugar ants are marching up and down the hive. The bees, meanwhile, are scurrying in and out of the hive while shuffling the ants off to some other existence. They would literally pick the ants up and fly off with them.
I realized that the ants were after the sugar water I had in the hive-top feeder. So I immediately geared up and set to taking the feeder off and dumping it out.
I didn’t do a full hive inspection, but rather just looked at the frames in the top box. These frames have been empty all winter, but now the bees have begun to draw them out with beautiful white comb. Out of the twelve empty frames I’d say that about five are being drawn out; one has a beautiful mushroom shaped comb blooming out of it.
After we removed the sugar water, Ryan disrupted the few ant piles in the vicinity and within about 15 minutes the number of ants dwindled to just a few. Whew!
