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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 honey on Jul 25th, 2010
Jim’s bees made him some beautiful honey this year, and yesterday he made a little party out of harvesting it. I helped pull honey from the supers…it was only around 96 degrees out there! Actually, the fact that the honey was so danged warm made it easier to extract (and, oh my gosh…you should taste [...]
Posted in Beekeeping Philosophy on Jun 18th, 2010
So. Yesterday I received news that Deb’s Uncle Doyle in Waco, Kentucky has collected tons of honey this year. Over the years he’s kept many hives, but now that he’s older he keeps only one—simply because he loves it…the heat in all that protective clothing keeps him from expanding his little operation again. Anyway, I [...]
Posted in honey on Jun 8th, 2010
I know, right? Once you learn you can’t get that honey you thought you were getting, it makes that honey unbearably desirable, doesn’t it. What a crazy life.
Posted in honey on Jun 7th, 2010
Reader, I know I got your hopes up for some honey. But I think our hopes may have flown off with the Amazon swarm. Yesterday’s inspection shows that all honey production has ground to a halt in Amazons. Because they swarmed, the remaining Amazons aren’t drawing comb or storing honey until their new queen gets [...]
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 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 honey on May 26th, 2010
I refuse to even think about plastic bottles for TwoHoneys. If you like those little squeezy bears with the flip-top hats, get out. Go get your honey elsewhere. TwoHoneys will be bottled in glass jars ONLY. Now that that’s settled, I have to find some jars that fill the bill. They have to be small…no [...]
Posted in honey on Apr 18th, 2010
Today I did a little work with the bees. They’re doing much more work than I am, let me tell you that. The new colonies (Tomboys and the Girls of Summer) are building comb like crazy. Because they were installed only a week ago, I had to leave them alone for a bit so they [...]