100% Local Ohio | Your Cincinnati Bee Connection
Posted in Beeyard on Apr 14th, 2011
When I got home from work yesterday, I lit the smoker, changed my clothes, and headed out to the beeyard. (I say “beeyard,” but it’s not really a separate yard, it’s simply the space where I keep the bees at the edge of the wood behind our house. I just like to say “beeyard.”) I [...]
Posted in Queen Rearing on Apr 12th, 2011
Yes, I’ve been absent for a few months. But the bees and I are both back to flying now. Only the Amazon hive made it through the past winter. I love those Amazons. Funny, I call them the Amazons without even thinking about it. The fact that the Amazons, the hive I captured from a [...]
Posted in Hive cycle on Oct 2nd, 2010
I went out to the beehives at 3:15 PM yesterday in order to film for you the young Amazon bees orienting. They were so active that I wanted you to see them, too, Reader. I got a brief video of them, but then a bee went in my ear and freaked me out. I slapped [...]
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 Art on Jun 1st, 2010
This is a video of either 1) the Amazon swarm robbing Tomboys and Girls of Summer, or 2) new bees doing their orientation flights. This is either a good thing or a bad thing, and I can’t tell the difference. Ignorance is making me nuts. For some reason, I feel as if this is simply [...]
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 Education on May 29th, 2010
We’d just settled down in the Adirondack chairs when I looked up into the tree. And there was something just not right about something up there…it looked odd. And then I saw it—the SWARM. My Amazons had swarmed and the swarm was drooping from the lowest branch of a tall tall tree. Too high to [...]
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 [...]