Frances and the Bee

The springtime weeks when tiny green leaves sprout all about just never get old.  These flowers bloom first in our yard. They are only a few inches tall but, trust me, they are packed with hope for warmer weather and brighter moments to come.  The unseasonably warm weather we have been having has many of us Minnesotans wondering if spring really is here to stay. Most agree we probably still have at least one surprise snowstorm yet to come. If you put your snowblower away, you know, that will be the day it snows. Regardless, the beautiful, warmer days have had the bees very busy. We even broke a record for a high temperature last week when we reached 84 degrees F.   Since we are talking about breaking records, this is the first time we have had all of our hives survive through winter, and we couldn't be more happy about it.  We attribute the success, so far, to a lot of things we did differently last fall, including heavy end-of-season feeding and treating for va...

In my last post, we set our bees in their winter location and treated them.  There was a light dusting of snow and it was mid-November.  Now we are at that time in February when it's almost March and we can't remember how January went by so quickly. We have been hearing a lot of people say it's been a relatively mild winter so far. For the most part, that is true, but we did have subzero temperatures for three weeks straight. We have been occasionally pressing our ear to the hives to hear the hum inside, hoping the bees were making it through. This afternoon was beautiful. The sun was shining, the temperature was around 40 degrees F (4 degrees C), and it was the moment we could see, after all these months, that all three colonies have survived winter so far. Wonderful! Between this and all of the birds singing, my hope for spring came rushing back. Many bees left the hive today to relieve themselves and there were more dead bees outside the entrances. These are kind of awkw...

In my last blog entry in July of last year, we were in the swing of the season and evaluating how the bees were handling themselves with the nectar flow. I will try to sum up the details of the end of the season and what surprised us this winter. We had two hives in 2018 that we purchased from a different source than we have purchased them from in the past. The hive that was doing poorly (in my opinion) was the most aggressive colony we had ever had. One even managed to sting through my leather glove! I also felt that it was the least hygienic hive that we had. It was low-producing and although we managed to help the colony get established with its own laying queen, we were unable to winter it. The hive that was initially doing well continued to do well. The only issue we ran into was with the queen excluder. This is a layer that beekeepers can use in a hive to keep the queen in the area where she lays eggs (the brood) and away from the honey frames. We haven’t used an excluder ...

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 ...

An updated post is, again, long overdue. We celebrated our 10-year anniversary at the end of July and took some time out of town to celebrate. It also means that by the time we returned, we started looking towards the end of the season for this year's beekeeping. Here are the official results from this year's hives: Let's just go ahead right away and say how awesome the second (from left) hive was -amazing queen, ideal temperament. It was as tall as Mr. Bee! We are definitely going to try to winter this colony. We are also considering whether or not to try to winter the fourth hive, which Little Miss Bee has titled as her own. Not too shabby for production, but these bees are on the aggressive side, though, so we have that to consider. The first hive was a struggle from the start. We tried to requeen it, which worked, but was not effective. This hive never took off and never seemed to be concerned about it. They had no honey stores by the end of the season, w...

Every year, someone in Minnesota says, "Winter is going to be terrible this year." Then, everyone else says, "I heard winter is going to be terrible this year." We do have our quirks. For example, the forecasted high temps for the next three days are 8, 15, and 37 (Fahrenheit). Of course, it has been wintry, as every year is here, but it has turned out to be a pretty mild winter so far in our area. In the winter, we don't normally open the hive unless we really need to. The cold temperatures can be stressful or even detrimental to the colony. To find out if they are alive and about how high up they have traveled in the hive (and possibly into their honey/food stores), we use this method: Listening. We did listen when we checked on the hive this last weekend, but we didn't hear anything. Normally there is a constant humming sound inside, like someone left the fan on (with an extra bzzz! here and there). After not hearing the hive, Mr. Bee opened...

I'm thinking back to the day before we got our very first packages of bees, that excitement, and this photo from 2013. Many people ask us how we got into beekeeping. You know how we sometimes talk about things we'll do "someday when we're old"? Places we will go, hobbies we thnk we will have time for, or - if you are like me - plants we will own. Well, beekeeping was one of those things for us. We talked about how neat it would be and how much we would love it. When Mr. T, a family friend on whose land we currently have our bees, bought his home, I casually said, "Let us know if you ever want bees on your land." Immediately, he said, "I do want bees here." We spent that winter reading and researching as much as we could and Mr. T introduced us to Mr. Martin, who would become our beekeeping mentor and friend. That very next spring, there we were - first time and lifelong beekeepers. Many people don't know this, but beeks (short for ...