100% Local Ohio | Your Cincinnati Bee Connection
Posted in Poetry on Dec 11th, 2011
What to Do the First Morning the Sun Comes Back BY ROSEANN LLOYD Find a clean cloth for the kitchen table, the red and blue one you made that cold winter in Montana. Spread out your paper and books. Tune the radio to the jazz station. Look at the bright orange safflowers you found last [...]
Posted in Winter on Dec 7th, 2011
Reader, a team of experts stands behind every reclaimed and transformed metal lawn chair. I want to introduce you to them as I go along. It has rained incessantly for over a week. During one dry period on Sunday, I painted all the parts of the previously sanded and prepped green metal lawn chairs I [...]
Posted in Bee Business on Oct 28th, 2011
Here’s my current dilemma: How can I get a bee business to steadily grow in a contained sort of way? This is what happens: Along the way, some wonderful people learn that I keep bees and that I help other people begin beekeeping. And those wonderful people really really really want to keep bees, too. [...]
Posted in Woodenware on Oct 20th, 2011
I woke in the night worried about the bees in my three nucs (a “nuc” is a small hive—usually composed of 5 frames rather than 8 or 10—and is the abbreviated form for “nucleus” hive). It’s getting cold. Tonight’s temperatures will be in the 30s with highs today reaching only into the 40s. And the [...]
Posted in Winter on Oct 14th, 2011
Reader, I thought you might like to see how I plan to winterize my hives. I’m probably a week or two late with these preparations—it’s already getting chilly, and I want to give the bees time to propolize the shim so cold air doesn’t come blowing in, but there’s the plan: This is the top [...]
Posted in Bee Removal on Oct 13th, 2011
I receive a lot of calls for bee removals at this time of year. This is a lousy time of year to remove honeybees, and, believe me, it’s a tough challenge to encourage homeowners to live throughout the winter with their hive of bees as housemates. Asking some people to live with their honeybees is [...]
Posted in Winter on Mar 3rd, 2010
It’s March, but it’s still cold. Too cold to open the hive boxes and check on the bees. But I sort of did it anyway. I did it because on Sunday I discovered that my friend Jim lost his second hive. All dead. And then yesterday I discovered that my friend and bee mentor Chris [...]
Posted in Art on Feb 17th, 2010
Even with the one hive of bees dead, I’m so so eager to get started with this stuff again. I’ve now got a basement brimming with pretty brood boxes, supers, bottom boards, inner covers, outer covers, feeders…and there’s nothing I can do with any of it until spring…meaning March or April. Okay…I need to settle [...]
Posted in Winter on Jan 21st, 2010
Don’t think the idea of some dead bees can stop me. Yesterday, I called Walter Kelley and ordered the supplies I need to complete my third hive. (I like the people on the phone at Walter Kelley’s; I always pepper them with a million questions, which they humor me to answer in that unhurried Kentucky [...]