Musings about bees
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…
When people find out I’m a beekeeper, usually the first question is, “Do you ever get stung?” I usually reply, “Only when I do something stupid”, which is pretty much the truth. Honey bees are judicious with their stings because to sting you is to die. Every now and then, Read more…
One of the downsides to top bar hives is that new comb is very fragile since it’s only attached to the top bar. In a Langstroth frame, the comb is attached to the foundation that provides stability, or if you are not using foundation, it gets supported on the 4 Read more…
I started out this year with one hive and one queen. Through splits and swarms and packages, I’m now up to seven queens for seven hives (brides for brothers?). Of the seven, two queens are home grown (raised from eggs of BnB1’s queen). All of them seem to be doing Read more…
On Saturday, I looked in to all the hives to see how the splits and packages were doing. I pulled out the queen cages earlier in the week from the package hives, but now I needed to see if the queens were alive and laying. Left Hand Hive When I Read more…
I went out for a walk today at work with my friend Lucia and when I got back to my office, I had e-mails, texts and videos from both my wife and neighbor telling me that BnB2 had swarmed. I had looked in the hive on Saturday and it didn’t Read more…
After last week’s split, this week it was time to install new packages of bees into Sarah’s and Duncan’s (Hello Kitty) hives, as well a new hive (for me) on someone else’s property. We bought 3 pound packages for each of the hives from Miles McGaughey (President of the Boulder Read more…