Last fall, I documented the process of building a top bar hive from scratch. Since then, I’ve been waiting to fill the hive with bees. My friend Chris (check out his blog) helped me out with this problem by telling me about a swarm in our area. He even drove me to the swarm and […]
Read more "Our First Swarm"For beginning beekeepers, opening the hive for an inspection always leads to a surprise. Yesterday was no different. This was our first over-winter inspection. We’re fortunate to be an a position to have living bees. But when we opened the hive, I didn’t expect to find mold growing on about half of the comb. Our first […]
Read more "Moldy Hive: First Spring Inspection"My wife and I were thrilled to have a photo of our bees featured in the Letters to the Editor section of American Bee Journal’s October 2015 issue. This is a great magazine that is a tremendous resource for beekeepers. You can visit their website at http://www.americanbeejournal.com Snippets from the publication are below. My wife […]
Read more "An Eye for Beekeeping "Recently my dad learned that different types of fabrics can be used to trap small hive beetles. These beetles can be a real pain if not controlled because their larvae can tunnel through comb and defecate in honey. Obviously not too enticing for humans or bees to eat! If it gets bad enough the bees […]
Read more "Scotch-Brite Beetle Trap – Part 1"Whether we’re talking about my bees or this blog, they are both back from the dead. I haven’t written in a while because I didn’t think my bees we’re going to make it. In my mind, for the past 6 months, they were already dead. Things weren’t going well (documented in previous posts) and I […]
Read more "Back from the Dead"For all intents and purposes, our new top bar hive is complete! I still have to drill the entrance holes, but besides that, it is ready to go (read part 1 and part 2 of this series to see how we got here). After assembling the hive with the help of my 3 year old daughter, […]
Read more "Height and Width: Building a Top Bar Hive on the Cheap – Part 3"During our last hive inspection we took this video of a honey bee chewing its way through the wax cap of its cell and emerging onto the scene. It look less than a minute. Just thought we’d share it. Sorry the filming it a little unsteady!
Read more "Emerging Honey Bee"All the advice we received was good: wait and let the bees take care of themselves. I’m happy to report you all were right. They did. They made a new queen and the colony is thriving again. We got in the hive this morning and found our queen in the second bar from the entrance, […]
Read more "Long Live the Queen"While I sit tight and wait to see how my colony turn outs (hoping they’ve made themselves a new queen), I continue to work on the new hive I’m building. In part one of this series, my wife and I built the body and legs of the hive. Here I will document how we installed the […]
Read more "Height and Width: Building a Top Bar Hive on the Cheap – Part 2"Last night I took a friend to see my hive. As we approached it, I immediately got concerned. Lots of bees were down roaming around on the gravel with seemingly no purpose. I hadn’t seen this behavior before, but had heard others describe similar “Zombees.” We watched them for a moment and then opened the […]
Read more "Queenless"
Promised Land Honey 