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Posted in Education on Aug 3rd, 2010
Now that I’ve had a day for my brain to clear, I can offer a brief report of my responses to the 2010 Northeast Treatment-Free Beekeeping Conference: It was tiring. I mean…it was three and a half 13-hour days of programming. And that’s an awful lot of exhausting. But it was also approximately 45 hours of bee [...]
Posted in Education on Jul 31st, 2010
Sometime during the day yesterday, I got bored. Maybe because 13 hours of anything just wears me out…I’ve been slipping away from the conference. I slip out of the room and outside to the sun. I take long walks in the woods. I slip into the car and drive to the hotel for a nap. [...]
Posted in Education on Jul 30th, 2010
I’ve found my people. (I found my people after getting pretty crazily lost in Boston. I must have passed Fenway Park 3 or 4 times. I swear to you…I could smell the hot dogs before I spotted Fenway. No lie.) Eventually I got back on track and made it to Leominster, Massachusetts in time for [...]
Posted in Education on Jul 29th, 2010
This morning I’m off to the Northeast Treatment Free Beekeeping conference. (I wonder if those people in charge realize that “Treatment-Free Beekeeping” requires a hyphen because there isn’t one in their title. You can’t just throw a bunch of words together and have it make sense…unless you’re me). I don’t know if I should pack [...]
Posted in Education on Jun 27th, 2010
I rode that scooter of mine all the way out to the Creation Museum and then completely forgot to take a single picture of Doug or of his bees there or of anything at the museum. What on earth is wrong with me? You know, I’m just not a big picture taker, and I completely [...]
Posted in Education on Jun 22nd, 2010
So I sent out a plea on the TriState Beekeeper forum asking for a mentor. You know, in an entire year of keeping bees, I’ve never seen another person working a hive. Sure, I’ve watched videos on YouTube until I’m blue in the face, but I’ve got questions, dang it. And this morning, I received [...]
Posted in Education on Jun 15th, 2010
I tried to follow some internet directions on how to start foundationless frames, but they seemed sort of messy and complicated. And yesterday I discovered a pretty good and very quick system and completely clean process that I’ll share here. Here’s an empty deep frame with a split top…there’s a little groove in the top [...]
Posted in Education on Jun 11th, 2010
My bee buddy Chris and I took a little roadtrip. Well, we didn’t really go far. He calls, he says, “You wanna go with me?,” I say, “Sure!,” he says, “I’ll be by in about 28 minutes,” and we go. Today he took me to visit a bee guy. Yard full of bee equipment both [...]
Posted in Education on Jun 4th, 2010
Those bee colonies that swarm are strong, and I want strong bees. I hated that one of my hives died last year…the hive that died was always kind of slow compared to the Amazons (which I got as a result of a swarm from Chris’s hive). It makes sense that it you’ve got strong colonies, [...]
Posted in Education on Jun 1st, 2010
We’ve had company for a few days, and that got us a little bit off our usual schedule around here. But I put our guests on a plane this afternoon, and when Deb got home we went out to check on the bees. Things seemed calm and happy, and I’m convinced that activity at Tomboys [...]