100% Local Ohio | Your Cincinnati Bee Connection
Posted in Hive Management on Sep 21st, 2010
Here’s the good news as promised, Reader. The bad news, as you’ll recall, is that the bees from the tree have now been combined with the Girls of Summer, and the small swarm I collected last week absconded. But on Sunday’s inspection of the remaining four hives, I found two absolutely gorgeous queens at work. [...]
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 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 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 [...]
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 [...]