It’s official. There are no bees that overwintered in my Bee Barn. I was worried that my new queens wouldn’t make it… and the spring was long and cold. Losing bees is part of beekeeping… and I have to say it’s not the fun part. Even the local bee business got hit hard this year,…
Category: Bees
Long Live the Queens
So much going on… I’ll finish this story first. I released my three new queens into their hives where they’ve been acclimating themselves and their new subjects. Two went smoothly, I opened their queen cages and they came out in a minute or so… One hive didn’t act very receptive, so I’m not sure how…
Hoping for Success
There’s plenty I don’t know about beekeeping and that was apparent today. I’ve purchased three new queens, as I didn’t see any larva or brood when I first checked the hives. My second check gave me the suspicion of a working layer… a worker bee that has begun laying as a queen. She will have…
Queen Journey
Better late than never, I suppose. Although I’ve driven by the Bee Barn and was happy to see bees entering and exiting my three hives, it’s never worked out, either temperature or time-wise, for me to open the hives and do my spring time check. Until today. What I found was not good. There’s worker…
Mind Your Own…
One thing I’ve been working on for the past few weeks, is a simple way to get clean bee’s wax from my old, discarded, dirty bee combs. Bee combs go through stages… from pristine white (brand new) honey comb to nasty dirty brood comb. These pieces are left from various cleanups I’ve done in my…
Dirt and Mess
Victoria’s visit was short and she left after lunch… The boys’ morning was spent digging in a dirt pile with cousins. I tried to teach some finer points of rammed earth castle building, but I’m not sure if it sank in or not! The past two days have been warm, although today’s wind put a…
Sweet!
I had help in my beeyard today! A friend wanted to learn about top bar hives. I shifted into “Teacher Mode” and explained everything as best I could. Not only is this a great honeycomb, but I love that I managed to catch a bee flying straight towards my camera! See it above the tire?…
Bee Break
Another day of babysitting, letting Megan ride once again. I cooked the cowboys lunch, and I do believe they were happy it was “just” half a day of riding today! They’ve been going and going… of course, not that they didn’t work the last half of the day doing something else! After lunch, I caught…
Bee Check
Bee check. The new bees have been in the Golden Hive and Beebylon for almost a week now. They look pretty happy to me… and Mess-opotamia is looking busy as well. Thanks to Sheri, who reminded me of the name of my own hive… There’s a bazillion dandelions now, so they SHOULD Bee Happy! They…
Must Bee Summer
A summer day at 73˚! The grass grew today for sure. Within the past three days we’ve gone from an elusive “is it green, yet?” to “wow, Wyoming’s thrown her green gown on!” While I am trying to finish up some yard work, once it was warm enough, I gave up my rake and lawnmower…
WANTED
Before we know it, Calving Season will have started. You know how there’s the meme going around the internet… Be Calm and ______ (fill in the blank with your favorite activity)? The sweatshirt that keeps getting posted on my Facebook page says “I can’t Be Calm… It’s Calving Season!” I really feel like buying that…
Of Mice and Bees
I got sidetracked… I meant to clean out my wood shed… there was garbage in there that needed hauled and burned… and I had planned to haul some wood for my stove in there for the winter. But, hey, I had to haul the garbage away first, so I did that. Since the burn pit…