Frances and the Bee

I realize that I think of updating this blog much more often than I do.  The beekeeping seasons are full of decisions, notes, and moments I would like to remember, but time just passes so quickly and the days are full.  This post has been something I have been putting off, though.   In late July, we lost Lee, who I called, "Mr. T," here on the blog. He was a friendly martial artist and retired correctional officer, a veteran, a naturalist and musician. He had been a friend to our family for over 30 years. He had a very short battle with cancer. Lee was the reason that we started beekeeping instead of letting it remain a daydream. Our bees have been kept on his land and he was one of their biggest cheerleaders. The last time I saw him, he brought us cold glasses of water while we were doing an inspection in the summer heat. I told him I wanted to update the blog again (since he was one of the handful of people who really read this), but that I wasn't sure I shoul...

Since I don't update the blog often, sometimes, when I sit to write, I wonder where to start.  After the last two years of beekeeping, we found ourselves in a place of learning mostly from the mistakes we made. Honey yield is not our main goal of this pursuit, but it is a goal, and we just didn't have the harvests we'd like to see. We haven't been as successful at getting our bees through winter as we want to be. This beekeeping year, we regrouped and have been working hard on keeping up with spring feeding, doing inspections more often and with more intention, learning MUCH more about pre-swarm behavior and inside-the-hive space management, etc. Each week, I kept thinking of updating my notes here, but I knew that several days later, we'd have more we had been thinking or doing...and so here we are in July, 2020. Oh, 2020.  I won't address the upheaval this year has brought with it except that, in the particular theme of things here, it brings to my mind quite ...

Well, quite a lot has changed in the six months since my last post.  We had one of our least productive years for honey and it was largely due to our failure to split the hives early in the season.  I also had surgery in the early fall which made preparing the hive for winter drop on the list of priorities. Still, Mr. Bee prepared the hive for winter on our patio in hopes that we could keep a closer eye on them.  We waited and watched and checked often to see if we could hear that buzz inside the box.  They made if for some time, but unfortunately, the hive starved out and we were looking at another, "opportunity to learn from out mistakes."  From talking with a couple other keepers in the area, it sounds like it was not a banner year for a lot of people around here. Like in years past, we have picked ourselves up by the bootstraps and we ordered two new packages of bees.  And then came the real time to persist... All of the beekeeping mistakes certainl...