What is the best way to help teach our children about how to deal with the challenges that will inevitably come in their future? One suggestion is to introduce them to beekeeping. As those of you who are beekeepers already know, beekeeping if full of plan bees (B’s). A lot of things don’t work out…
August 30, 2018 – Although we had heard from friends that live a little further south that they had seen goldenrod a month ago, we hadn’t seen any blooming. That ended this past week as it seems that the goldenrod is exploding all over our area. It seems that it may be a little early…
This year was progressing rather nicely as far as the small hive beetles go. We hadn’t seen more then 4 total in all our hives. In the last two weeks they have brought along all their brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and everyone else they know. It has been an absolute explosion of them. More…
Have you been experiencing the same thing we have so far this year? What is going on with the pollen supply? By this time of year (today is July 10) we would normally have several hives that we would be concerned about becoming pollen bound. They definitely would have stopped taking any pollen patty that…
You never think it is going to happen to you. Especially in Wayne County Ohio. We don’t have bears here, do we? Julie and I went out on Friday afternoon (May 25) to check on our hives and release our new Russian queens from their queen introduction frames. It was a beautiful May day right…
To get your hives through the Winter, you should ideally make sure they have enough stores to get them through until new nectar is available in the Spring. This doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes the weather doesn’t cooperate. Sometimes the bees eat too much of the feed they are supposed to put away…
Our new Russian queens arrive on Wednesday May 16th. We purchased these from Coy’s out of Mississippi, who are part of the Russian queen breeders group. These queens are already mated and since they only run Russians in there queen yards, they most likely have mated with Russian drones. Not as pure blood as AI,…
Last Saturday (April 14th) we drove to Columbus to have lunch with our son and then go on to Conrad Hive and Honey to pick up 4 packages of bees that we ordered. Our intention last year was to never have to buy package bees again. Well, with the losses we sustained this past winter…
We have three hives left after the winter losses but we are not out of the woods yet. March and April can be very hard on bees, especially those that may be weak both in health and in numbers, and those who have burned through their food stores. We put sugar bricks on in January…
We took advantage of a decent Tuesday afternoon to take a look at our hives and see how they are doing and if they needed any feed. It was a sunny afternoon with a slight wind and a temperature of about 48 degrees. Seemed like a good day to look inside the hives. When we…