We’ve been experiencing a dry, warm Autumn in Colorado. Although we had our first hard freeze the other day, temperatures have been in the mid 80’s the past couple of days. The bees are still out collecting pollen from the few remaining cosmos and asters, but their foraging resources are Read more…
As summer winds down and we are now in the meteorological autumn, the bees are getting ready for the coming winter. Pollen and nectar sources are winding down, but in my yard, a couple of different agastache plants are still blooming and the bees are loving them. In my front Read more…
In my last post, I mentioned that Laura’s hive was queenless and there were no signs that any of the queens that had hatched made it back from their mating flights. I spent the week trying to buy a new queen locally, but all my efforts turned up empty handed. Read more…
It’s been a hot, dry summer for the bees, but that hasn’t stopped them from making a good crop of honey. Normally, first year packages spend their time building comb and enough honey to get them through the winter and a honey harvest is not in the cards. But mine Read more…
On Saturday, it was time to harvest some honey from Duncan’s hive (aka Hello Kitty). His sisters and parents joined in the fun – watching, laughing, videoing and getting stung. What should have been an easy harvest, turned into a bit of a mess because there was a lot of Read more…
I took advantage of a change in the weather (30 degrees F cooler than yesterday) to harvest some of the honey out of BnB1. In past inspections, they had been making brand new white comb in the back and capping some delicious looking honey in it – perfect for taking Read more…
Since BnB2 was completely full last time I checked, I needed to pull out a couple of bars of capped honey to make some room. The nice thing about top bar hives is that you can open up the back, steal a few bars and close it all back up Read more…