Frances and the Bee

Happy Spring?? Minnesota is taking its time to switch over to warm temperatures, and I have some updating to do before I start the Bee Day update. I genuinely thought I had updated the blog last fall when the last of our hives died. I did not make a post like I thought I had. Although I left off with us treating for mites, we lost all of the remaining bees within weeks of my last post.  It was extremely disappointing after having had such a successful year; all hives survived last winter, we managed the most hives we have ever had at once in a beautiful new location, and we took our highest honey yield. Alas, all the hives succumbed and we didn't winter any. Many people think of beekeeping as being either really scary (being surrounded by 100,000 bees!?) or they think of it as being super idealized (scooping out honey whenever we want). Beekeeping is sometimes intimidating and is certainly beautiful and fascinating, but I want take a moment to remind readers that beekeeping is...

It has been a hot, dry summer and we have been trying to stay both busy and cool. Those two things don't often go together in early August, but we try to soak in as much warmth as we can during this time, in hopes that it will keep us warm when the seasons change. The way that nature continues on in its cycles continues to be motivating and beautiful, just like the monarch caterpillars and butterfly above. Our garden beds are booming and we have stayed in awe of the plants growing and the honey bees working as hard as ever throughout all the difficulty of the last year.  Here is one bed in our garden. This snapshot features our son, and it's back in May when the tomatoes were having a good start...  ...and now. We have to get the ladder out to harvest these! In years past, I have talked about each of our honey bee hives individually, giving specific details about how we have made decisions.  Having six distinct hives, it would be too much explanation. Instead, I will give...

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...

It is now August, and signs of the last part of summer are all around.  The county fair came and went, the school supply lists are out, and the leaves on the trees can be heard a little more as the wind blows through them. Minnesotans, although very fond of autumn, try not to mention its pending arrival.  We are soaking up every last drop of summer here. In my last update, we had two awesome hives and I was daydreaming about a stack of honey supers taller than me on each one. We started to see fresh, capped honey. With the changes in season come the usual changes to plant and animal life in the area. The corn is high, some of the flowers are going to seed, and the deer are out at sunset to eat up soybeans.  This isn't to mention how plump some of the toads have gotten: Unfortunately, though, we have also had a change in our beekeeping season. During one of the inspections a while back, we saw that the brood patterns were really healthy and we decide...