most addiction start out innocently enough. I'll just try one, or I'll only do it once. Then you start thinking, 'well that wasn't too bad, I'll do it again' or 'i'll have another.' Then before you know it, you've spent all your money and have nothing to show for it.
Ok, maybe it isn't that bad (yet) and hopefully this addiction will result in lots of beautiful honey. Hopefully....
Last year we purchased 1 package of bees. A package is about 3 lbs of worker bees & drones, along with an unrelated queen. At the end of the bee seasons, we decided that having 1 hive was fun, but everyone suggests having 2 hives so that you can compare them against each other, so we bought another package. We were pretty excited. Last year's hive (Hive 1), was doing great. They had lots of honey that lasted them all winter, and enough that we were able to give some to the new hive (Hive 2), to help get them going. Hive 1 continued to kick butt and we were excited to get some honey from it. Then, Memorial Day Weekend happened.
I left work a little early because my In-Laws were coming to visit, and as I was walking out to the car, I got a text from my husband. It was just a picture of a bee swarm. I called him up to let him know I was going to be late, and sped away to the "local" bee supply store - 45 minutes away. The bee store had just enough supplies for us to catch that swarm, but it was tight. They were running desperately low on supplies, all the bees in the area were swarming, and the truck with the rest of their supplies was in transit....somewhere. I raced home, because we still had work to do to get the supplies ready to be a new bee home.
The next morning, we got up early, while it was still pretty chilly out, and collected the bees. The bees thought it was early, and cold, so they didn't want to move too fast and were very easy to catch. Now we were up to 3 hives.
The following weekend, Hive 1 swarmed again. This was so awesome to watch! I was sitting outside on Saturday morning, doing some work things, when I looked up and the sky was full of bees. It was a giant arch of bees from Hive 1 to the post that Hive 3 had swarmed on. Again we had to race to the local bee supply store. They were even lower on supplies this time, so we had to try somewhere else. By the time we made it home, the swarm was no where to be found. Maybe we were actually lucky there.
My normal after-work routine is to grab my camera, and my dog, and head outside to do some picture taking. Sometimes I take pictures of flowers, other times the dog, or I keep my eye out for some interesting looking bugs hanging out. Friday, I decided that I was tired of bug pictures and it was time for some Hudson pictures. My husband gets home and says, "Ter, why are you taking pictures of the dog and not the bees?" I thought he was referring to my recent habit of hunting down some bees (local & honey) on the clover that is starting to bloom. Boy was I wrong! He was referring to another swarm. We hurried around and put the final touches on a hive, then looked around the yard and went...."so where do we want to put this one?" Bees like their hives to be level, our yard is anything but that. But like most of plans, we went ahead and caught the swarm, deciding that figuring out where to put it was a good job for Future Ben & Terri.
Today we will be building another 2-hive, hive stand for Hive 3 & 4...
We now need to go through Hive 1 to figure out why it keeps swarming. Our guess, the queen is being too nice, and instead of killing any un-hatched queens, they just swarm every time a new queen emerges. Silly bees....
and now onto pictures...
The queen cage from this year's package. Packages ship with unrelated queens, and bees will not readily accept a new queen. What they do, instead, is put the queen in her own cage, with a candy plug. The plug is normally made out of fondant (like for cakes). It will take around 5 days for the candy to be eaten by the bees, and by that time, the bees will have grown accustom to the pheromones of the new queen and will accept her. If you were to just release a new queen into a hive, they hive would surround her, and kill her. Of course, the package we go this year decided to cluster around the honey, instead of releasing the queen, so she died and we had to get a new one. That hive is affectionately known as The Dumb Hive.
When using a Langstoth hive (the tall ones that are normally painted white), people will have around 2 deep boxes on the bottom, then a queen excluder, and finally medium boxes on top of that. This keeps the queen in the bottom two boxes for laying eggs, and the top boxes are only honey. No one wants bee bits in their honey. This is the size difference between a deep and a medium
This is a deep frame with wax foundation. Different bee keepers use different foundation on their frames. Some even go foundationless. The idea with using foundation is that it gives the bees something to draw out the honey comb. The bees will draw the comb outward from the foundation. In foundationless frames, the bees will draw the comb down from the top. The benefit of using foundation is that the comb tends to be nice and straight and neat. Foundationless frames can get a little wonky sometimes.
The Memorial Day Swarm
From left to right - Hives 1, 2, & 3, with the different parts labeled. On hive 1, you can see the line between the top Deep and the Medium. That line is the queen excluder I walked about before.
Ok, maybe it isn't that bad (yet) and hopefully this addiction will result in lots of beautiful honey. Hopefully....
Last year we purchased 1 package of bees. A package is about 3 lbs of worker bees & drones, along with an unrelated queen. At the end of the bee seasons, we decided that having 1 hive was fun, but everyone suggests having 2 hives so that you can compare them against each other, so we bought another package. We were pretty excited. Last year's hive (Hive 1), was doing great. They had lots of honey that lasted them all winter, and enough that we were able to give some to the new hive (Hive 2), to help get them going. Hive 1 continued to kick butt and we were excited to get some honey from it. Then, Memorial Day Weekend happened.
I left work a little early because my In-Laws were coming to visit, and as I was walking out to the car, I got a text from my husband. It was just a picture of a bee swarm. I called him up to let him know I was going to be late, and sped away to the "local" bee supply store - 45 minutes away. The bee store had just enough supplies for us to catch that swarm, but it was tight. They were running desperately low on supplies, all the bees in the area were swarming, and the truck with the rest of their supplies was in transit....somewhere. I raced home, because we still had work to do to get the supplies ready to be a new bee home.
The next morning, we got up early, while it was still pretty chilly out, and collected the bees. The bees thought it was early, and cold, so they didn't want to move too fast and were very easy to catch. Now we were up to 3 hives.
The following weekend, Hive 1 swarmed again. This was so awesome to watch! I was sitting outside on Saturday morning, doing some work things, when I looked up and the sky was full of bees. It was a giant arch of bees from Hive 1 to the post that Hive 3 had swarmed on. Again we had to race to the local bee supply store. They were even lower on supplies this time, so we had to try somewhere else. By the time we made it home, the swarm was no where to be found. Maybe we were actually lucky there.
My normal after-work routine is to grab my camera, and my dog, and head outside to do some picture taking. Sometimes I take pictures of flowers, other times the dog, or I keep my eye out for some interesting looking bugs hanging out. Friday, I decided that I was tired of bug pictures and it was time for some Hudson pictures. My husband gets home and says, "Ter, why are you taking pictures of the dog and not the bees?" I thought he was referring to my recent habit of hunting down some bees (local & honey) on the clover that is starting to bloom. Boy was I wrong! He was referring to another swarm. We hurried around and put the final touches on a hive, then looked around the yard and went...."so where do we want to put this one?" Bees like their hives to be level, our yard is anything but that. But like most of plans, we went ahead and caught the swarm, deciding that figuring out where to put it was a good job for Future Ben & Terri.
Today we will be building another 2-hive, hive stand for Hive 3 & 4...
We now need to go through Hive 1 to figure out why it keeps swarming. Our guess, the queen is being too nice, and instead of killing any un-hatched queens, they just swarm every time a new queen emerges. Silly bees....
and now onto pictures...
The queen cage from this year's package. Packages ship with unrelated queens, and bees will not readily accept a new queen. What they do, instead, is put the queen in her own cage, with a candy plug. The plug is normally made out of fondant (like for cakes). It will take around 5 days for the candy to be eaten by the bees, and by that time, the bees will have grown accustom to the pheromones of the new queen and will accept her. If you were to just release a new queen into a hive, they hive would surround her, and kill her. Of course, the package we go this year decided to cluster around the honey, instead of releasing the queen, so she died and we had to get a new one. That hive is affectionately known as The Dumb Hive.
When using a Langstoth hive (the tall ones that are normally painted white), people will have around 2 deep boxes on the bottom, then a queen excluder, and finally medium boxes on top of that. This keeps the queen in the bottom two boxes for laying eggs, and the top boxes are only honey. No one wants bee bits in their honey. This is the size difference between a deep and a medium
This is a deep frame with wax foundation. Different bee keepers use different foundation on their frames. Some even go foundationless. The idea with using foundation is that it gives the bees something to draw out the honey comb. The bees will draw the comb outward from the foundation. In foundationless frames, the bees will draw the comb down from the top. The benefit of using foundation is that the comb tends to be nice and straight and neat. Foundationless frames can get a little wonky sometimes.
The Memorial Day Swarm
From left to right - Hives 1, 2, & 3, with the different parts labeled. On hive 1, you can see the line between the top Deep and the Medium. That line is the queen excluder I walked about before.
