We inspected our hive this afternoon — they need food! There are maybe three frames full of bees, so we consolidated down to one hive body and removed all of the empty frames. There are bees bringing in nectar and pollen, very little brood (research tells me this is normal for this time of year since rearing brood takes a lot of resources). Most importantly, though, we need to order winter bee food and get that into the hive quickly.
Tag: beehive
Magic Bees
One of our chickens, Soaring Eagle, manages to escape the chicken tractor rather frequently. Even when I’ve locked it down — Anya doesn’t get the door closed up well, and I know exactly how they escape … but I’ve got that thing locked down. And, still, there’s a chicken in the yard. Because she’s a magic chicken.
We drove out to pick up our bees on Saturday. Scott was apprehensive about them because, well, it’s a big box full of bees. The guy was in the middle of explaining how the box is all sealed up and maybe a bee or two might escape, but they’d buzz around the back window as we drove and it’d all be fine. Except we started noticing a stream of bees coming out of the nuc. We, it seems, have magic bees too. The bee guy put bags around our nucs so we wouldn’t have a hundred bees buzzing around the car as we drove. That turned out to be a really good thing. The one nuc had a handful of bees in the bag. The one we’d noticed the bees coming out of? It most certainly did have a couple hundred bees outside of the box. I carried this box to the back of our property. Getting the bag off was a bit of a challenge even in a bee suit. They weren’t super thrilled about the relocation process. But they’re happily settled now.
Buzzzzzz
Months from having any residents … but our hive arrived!
Apiary Thoughts
We made mead from local honey, and it’s got me thinking about having our own hives. In Ohio, you have to register your apiary every year — something to remember if we do get a hive! We’d need to get a hive — and misc equipment. Harvesting the honey seems pretty labor intensive — I like the Flow hives, but a grand for a hive is a lot and I expect there’s a lot of honey that remains in the hive. Which may not be a bad thing — I’ve certainly read about people feeding their bees sugar water over the winter. And I assume that’s from over-harvesting the honey.
Quilt tops — a shallow box on the top of the hive, with a wire mesh on the bottom, which is filled with straw or wood chips. It’s insulation.