100% Local Ohio
Posted in Hive Management on Aug 6th, 2010
I had a happy sighting yesterday. Remember that split I made exactly 24 days ago? No? Well, let me remind you: I took a frame containing some queen cells I’d found in Tomboys, and I made a split…which means I began a new colony from an old one by placing that queen-cell-containing frame in a [...]
Posted in Hive Management on Jul 20th, 2010
Success! Yesterday I inserted a box I fashioned from two shallows between my two brood boxes in Girls of Summer. They’re the most robust of our colonies, and they’ve been mighty crowded and hot and bearding like crazy. So, I pulled deep frames of brood up from the bottom box and into the center of [...]
Posted in Hive Management on Jul 19th, 2010
Those bees are bearding like crazy. Which means they are hot and crowded. But they won’t move up into the new supers I’ve added in order to give them some extra room. And yesterday I found swarm cells in Tomboys again. Shit. I would normally add an empty box below one of the brood boxes [...]
Posted in Hive Management, Uncategorized on Jul 14th, 2010
I discovered a couple of swarm cells in Tomboys before I left for Florida last week. I thought for sure Tomboys would swarm before I returned, and they may have…hard to tell. Today the swarm cells were still there, so in order to keep the bees from swarming and to take advantage of the new [...]
Posted in Hive Management on Jul 5th, 2010
Gosh darn crazy bees are driving me nuts. I decided to begin my transition from 10-frame deep and shallow boxes to all 8-frame mediums, and I began the process today. I added a new smaller box to each of my three hives. Now they look a little bit lopsided and goofy, but transitions are tough, [...]
Posted in Hive Management on Jun 25th, 2010
This morning I brought up the idea of keeping a few hives of bees at the farm, and Deb did not say “No.” Actually, I think I heard an actual “Yes” somewhere in her response. The 80-acre farm in Waco, Kentucky is a 2-hour drive from here, and we get down there for a couple [...]
Posted in Hive Management, Uncategorized on Jun 23rd, 2010
I spent a little bit of time yesterday leveling my beehives. Why do that, you ask? Well, I’m slowly shifting from using foundation in my frames to using only foundationless frames, that’s why. And when bees build comb into thin air (and it is beautiful and perfect comb…I don’t know why we ever ever ever [...]
Posted in Hive Management on Jun 14th, 2010
My weekly Sunday hive inspections yesterday revealed: Amazons—No signs of the queen yet. I’m choosing to remain patient, though, because I think it’s a little too early to see signs of her post swarm. Amazons swarmed 16 days ago, and it should take about 22-25 days for the new queen to be born, orient, mate, [...]
Posted in Hive Management on Jun 3rd, 2010
Yesterday when I got home from work, I jumped into my long pants, my long-sleeved shirt, my socks, my boots, my gloves, my hat, my veil, fired up the smoker and visited the bees. I didn’t know if they’d still be pissy with me for my rude behavior the day before, but they were as [...]
Posted in Hive Management on May 31st, 2010
After trimming trees around the house for much of the afternoon, we were taking a little iced-tea break on our deck. I began to see quite a bit of activity out in the bee yard…more than usual. It didn’t look like a swarm, but there were a lot of bees. You can see them when [...]