Frances and the Bee

Yes, July is here, and so is the summer's main nectar flow. The bees are, as always, working hard to forage and make honey. We have been researching and turning ideas over to find what we can do better now and each season.  This season, we have two hives, the first one being very strong. It has the best temperament of any hive we've had. The queen has an excellent brood pattern and the colony has been steadily growing. This  brings our first attempt at a split, making two hives out of one. Mr. Bee built a great nuc box and we filled it with several frames of eggs and bees from the strong hive, leaving the queen with the original colony. The plan is to relocate the nuc box so that the bees inside make a new queen for themselves out of the eggs we provided. We did move the box and have been waiting to see if this has been successful and what the next step will be. The second hive had a very poor start. Their temperament has been bad their brood pattern h...

Last fall was a very busy time for us. We had many things going on, and although we harvested our honey and kept our best hopes for the bees to winter, we didn't get to spend as much time closing out the season as we would have liked.  One hive made it through January, and no hives made it all the way through our long, long winter. As I have said, our winter was long here in central Minnesota.  It always feels long in February and March, but it really was long this year.  One local company had bee pickup in April and there was a blizzard the next week!  Our beekeeping mentor had his bees arrive with that shipment, and (to his wife's dismay) he kept those girls down in their basement for a couple weeks until the terrible weather passed.  Well, winter finally did pass by, and we are smitten with Minnesota again.  Sunshine and green is what we really needed to see. In my last post, I explained that we were waiting for "nucs" of Italian honeybees this ye...

Some people have been asking if the remaining hive has made it through winter.  Unfortunately, it did not, so we are awaiting a fresh start again this year. It has been sort of a slow start to the season, though.  I read the other day that it felt like the 57th day of February here in the Midwest. It's sad, but true. We are right in the middle of April, and still looking at another snowstorm in the forecast for the upcoming weekend.  On April 5th last year, I wrote that we had just picked up our bees. We know a couple people who have received their bees here, including our mentor, Mr. Martin. Because of the cold, he has been keeping his bees in the basement and just installed them yesterday. Mr. Bee, Little Mr. Bee, and Scout were able to be there with Mr. Martin yesterday when he moved them back inside. He can keep them there for a couple of weeks now since he has provided them with honey and controlled temperatures. Here is a photo of Mr. Martin and one od his ...

Well, Groundhog Day happened last week and the old guy saw his shadow, so I guess we have six more weeks of winter.  We were all expecting it here in Minnesota.  We are in that long, quiet stretch of winter where we are starting to feel it's "too cold," but we know that we haven't hit the typically coldest part of the year yet.  Because we moved last fall, we weren't able to put as much energy as we typically do into winterizing and monitoring our hives.  I took a trip out in January to see how things were going. Surprisingly, walking up to this was not as alarming as one might think. A healthy colony can lose between 30 and 40 thousand bees over the winter so the fact that they were dumped outside is actually a sign that things might be ok inside.  Bees are naturally clean - beekeepers call this "hygienic," and it means they keep a clean and healthy living environment. We might be more alarmed this time of year if we walked out to ...