It’s been a long time coming, but last week Wayne finally had time to head out to our land and check on the bees. The hive stand & hives as he found them are above. One obstacle hurdled. There has been some bear activity around our land over the last few years and I was [...]
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It was supposed to rain early Sunday afternoon, so before lunch we headed out to inspect the hive in the backyard. I didn’t want to disturb the girls too much, but I wanted to get a general feeling for how they were doing and (if we were so lucky) to grab a frame or two [...]
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Part of our big plans for the weekend included a much-needed trip to the land to inspect the new hives. It was a beautiful day although rather warm and I wasn’t looking forward to a long stretch in a very hot bee suit. It was also threatening to storm. As we got out of [...]
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We promised ourselves we would do a complete inspection today. Because of our schedules today, we didn’t get the opportunity to open the hive until late in the evening (6pm). We try not to open the hives so late for several reasons. First, most of the bees will be in the hive that late in [...]
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We had a few minutes today before leaving for Spring Daze in Cary so we decided to do a quick hive inspection. As soon as we opened the nuc, I knew something was wrong. The buzz from the hive was different than usual, and the girls seemed quite agitated. Inside we found frames of honey, [...]
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I recently got a message from a friend who was looking for a hive. Since he had given us our original hive (which we still have), we offered it back but warned that we found the bees to be quite aggressive. They weren’t bothered too much by that, so we set a date for [...]
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Last weekend we (finally!) had time to inspect both hives. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m rather nervous about our taller hive. The bees are just plain aggressive. I hope that I’m exaggerating this feeling both in my head and in my posts, but I won’t know until I can talk another beekeeper into coming [...]
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – beekeeping is just an ongoing series of lessons for me. Wayne had some time the other day and decided to check on the middle hive. He reported back that it was completely devoid of bees. I would be devastated if I hadn’t been expecting it. The hive [...]
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Lots of updates: 1 – The solar wax melter was a success. I did run into a problem the second day: my paper towel kept breaking. The weight of the hot wax was just too much for it. Luckily Wayne had some fine screen in the garage and we attached that to the container and [...]
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Because of bad weather and some other extenuating circumstances including an upcoming trip to France for 10 days, we have decided not to pick up our new hive until later in the month. I was disappointed but also grateful because it gave me one less thing to worry about while we were trying to get everything together [...]
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