Preparing Hive Inspection Gear

This week marks the beginning of my hive inspections for my hives in Atlanta. I spent some time on Friday getting my gear in gear. I washed all my hive tools and scrubbed their ends with a brass scrub. The yellow one was caked with propolis and took some elbow grease to get clean. I plan to wash used tools at the end of every inspection this year and I plan to carry a container of Wet-ones with me to wipe them off on site.

This is an effort to prevent disease spread from hive to hive.



What's in my hive bag? Two magnifying glasses are there to help people see eggs when I have people accompanying me on inspections.



I also carry, as you can see in the photo below, a propane lighter for my smoker, two permanent markers to write on frames or hive boxes if need be; a container of Benadryl for a sting reaction, a bee brush, a drape for the hive, some baby powder to use if I wear nitrile gloves; several hive tools, a container of thumb tacks, a pair or two of nitrile gloves, a couple of empty ziploc baggies, some rubber bands; a paper towel or two; and a jar of swarm lure that I made.




There may be a couple of other things in there - oh, yes, my Swiss army knife, a frame rack, some string, my leather bee gloves, a pair of pruning shears.

I bought this container at a knitting class I took at the John Campbell Folk School but I kept losing things in the deep pockets.  It never was a knitting bag, but is actually a tool bag - the knitting folks re-purposed it, but it didn't ever really work for me.  It works great as an inspection bag.



So I'm ready to inspect Blue Heron on Sunday and Topsy on Tuesday.

Cleaning the beekeeper's gloves

Recently there have been posts on Beemaster about cleaning the gloves we wear. I read somewhere about washing your hands with soap and water while wearing the gloves. In the first picture, you can see my gloves right after I washed my hands with soap and water. Then I put olive oil on my gloves - you can see it glistening in the fold in the middle of the hand in the second picture. I work the oil into the gloves as I would hand lotion on my hands. Then the glove remains soft and nice for wearing the next time I visit the hives.


My biggest problem with gloves is not cleaning them but rather the size that they are. My hands are small and gloves are made for men - so look at my hand on top of the glove and you can see that I have a lot of unused space at the tips of my fingers - makes for clumsy manipulation!