Feral Colony

The bees out in the back seem to be active. This catalpa tree is home
to the honey bees that got me interested in beekeeping last season.
After reading about the decimation of the wild bee population it
seemed like a perfect time to purchase some bees.
A fellow sailor and friend of mine in Toronto had talked to me several
years ago about becoming a beekeeper, and it always seemed like a
wonderful activity. With the purchase of an old farmhouse on a couple
acres of land the time was right.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trapout in Bergen - Video update

Image
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.
Read more

Craig Yerdon's Organically Managed Beekeeping Podcasts

Image
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
Read more

Mid-Summer Honey

Image
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.
Read more