My inspection of the big Sam hive in my Home Yard revealed a massive population occupying three full mediums and getting honey bound or rather, egg bound. Capped brood was intermixed with nectar, though not much. Possibly whatever is brought in and processed is instantly consumed by this massive population. The weather has been conducive …
Category Archives: bees
It’s a Wrap
It’s cold now, below freezing all day long, but next week we’re looking at the Polar Vortex again, or so they say. So I got cracking on finishing up the wrapping of the hives. I choose to go with just the black tar paper – foregoing the pink insulation material. Here they are:
And then there were four…
robbers trying to get into the top entrance (closed) The robbing at the Common Yard continued, relentless. As soon as I had removed the robbed-out Borgia hive, the aggressive colony started on the next one down, the Constanza colony. A fellow Common beek alerted me and I ran over and closed literally all entrances to …
Lost Two Hives, So Soon
All last week some of the other colonies in the Common Yard were robbing the Borgia hive. All I could do was close the top entrance, and the bottom entrance was already reduced to the minimum, which slowed down the process. I didn’t open the hive as it would have invited a frenzy, which I …
Can’t Get Enough of Local Food
Homemade yogurt from local milk and homegrown honey. Yum!
Getting the Bees Ready for Winter
The last couple of days have been “bee days,” as they’re called in our household. Mama smells of smoke, and a honeybee inevitable gets into the house or a car or a bee suit (yikes). But it’s all good. The aim is to get all seven hives ready for winter. I have some strong queens …
More Crazy Double-Nuc Manipulations: Moving out a Colony
Ah, the troublesome double nuc: time to get rid of it. The two splits (Hive 6 with queen Tatjana and Hive 7 with queen Anna) were growing out of it. The plan: to move H6 – whose entrance was facing west (“backward”) – to the common apiary (3 miles away), and to move H7 into …
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Harvests
Today I extracted some massive honey combs. My experiment with foundationless frames went a tad awry, the bees drawing out bulging combs wherever there was space because the next frames was empty. First it made for some puzzling to get those frames out of the two boxes. After using the bee escape for a night, …
Drought
It’s been hard in our neck of the woods. We had 0.69 inches of rain this month. Not even one inch. The Department of Environmental Protection has issued a “Severe Drought Warning†for my county. Thunderstorm after thunderstorm has evaporated, glanced off or split around our area. The Wundermap shows their tragic course all too …
Queen Replacement
Turns out Dan of Warm Colors Apiaries sent me two Russian queens, so I didn’t have to choose between replacing Laura (Hive 4) and making another split (Hive 7-to-be). I could do both! I went into 4 and found Laura where she usually hangs out, in the top box. DH stood at a safe distance …