100% Local Ohio | Your Cincinnati Bee Connection
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 [...]
Posted in Hive Management on May 30th, 2010
I go from being happy to being sad about the Amazon swarm. Happy because some mighty fine and robust and healthy bees have propagated, and they live near me. Sad because half my Amazon hive is gone. Happy because half my Amazon hive remains. Sad because I just read in Bee Culture magazine that there [...]
Posted in Hive Management on Apr 13th, 2010
When we installed our two new colonies on Sunday, I watched several Amazon girls hauling grass and twigs and dead leaf material from their hive. Uh oh, I thought. Today I dug into their hive to check their spring progress, and I discovered a dead mouse between the top and bottom boxes. I scraped his [...]
Posted in Hive Management on Mar 24th, 2010
I think my Amazon girls are getting ahead of me. It was at this time last year that this very group swarmed; and based on the activity I see out at their hive, it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t try that trick again. But I don’t have time in the next few days to [...]
Posted in Hive Management on Jan 1st, 2010
The bees’ primary biological drive is to swarm. I read it this morning in Bee Culture magazine, and the moment I read it, it seemed right. Reader, if you’re new to bees, you’ll want to learn that when bees get too crowded in a hive, they raise a second queen. Once the new queen is [...]
Posted in Hive Management on Dec 31st, 2009
I mean, if you already have two hives, what’s the big deal about adding a third, right? That’s what I’m thinking. I’ve been watching some YouTube videos about beekeeping (to which I will probably contribute once I know something), and some of those people have piles of hives in small spaces. There’s one guy in [...]
Posted in Hive Management on Dec 29th, 2009
See those black cardboard boxes on yesterday’s post? The ones I used to cover the hives? Not only do those boxes add a layer of insulation, but the blackness absorbs the little sunlight we have here in the Ohio River Valley…and that keeps the bees warmer. My hope is that the warmer they are, the [...]