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Oak Orchard Honey

Honey from organically managed bees on the south shore of Lake Ontario.

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To contact us for honey and prices:

Email scramtwo@aol.com

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Trapout in Bergen - Video update

I didn't have any fresh eggs to place in the trapout, so I contacted Jill at www. bloomfieldhoney .com/ ‎. She was great and sold me a laying queen so I was able to get things all set up. Here is the video of what was done. I'm going to go over and remove the cone from the tree to allow the new established hive to rob-out the old hive in the tree. I assume there is a lot of honey left behind and I want this new hive to build up enough stores to make it through winter. With only one hive really established back at our apiary, we won't have much honey to harvest this year. Hopefully, if we continue to grow we will be able to split some hives in the future.

Craig Yerdon's Organically Managed Beekeeping Podcasts

I have been really enjoying Craig's podcast about organic hive methods. A couple of things have been repeated enough times in just a few episodes to make me understand their importance. 1. I need to stop with the large cell foundation for reasons made very clear by Craig and his guests 2. I need to switch over to 8 frame mediums for all my hive boxes, again for various reasons. 3. I need to re-listen to the pod casts and write down a few things that will make me a better keeper. The things I am hearing help me to better understand the nature of bees. I always felt that if I had to keep the bees alive by artificial or pharmacological methods I would need to just get out of the hobby. It sounds like I can have success without introducing foreign materials into the hives - that's perfect... Link: http://somdbeekeeper.com

Mid-Summer Honey

The mid-summer harvest went well. Both hives seem to be building up at about the same rate. We were able to extract a medium super off each hive leaving four mediums for the bees. The last frame on each super had not been fully drawn out so I swapped them out for one of the empty frames on the supers I added. This is one of the reasons I will be switching over to eight frame mediums; those outside frames are hard to get drawn out. Also, in eight frame mediums the bees are less likely to eat themselves into a corner and not be able to move up into the honey stores.