Host Hive Inspection with a Guest
A member of the beekeeping club that I belong to has shown interest in top bar beekeeping. I invited him to inspect the host hive with me. We met up at eight am on August first. The weather was good and the sun was out. We looked in the observation window first. They had a …
Inspection of Host Top Bar Hive
On June 16th, I inspected the hive at the host house. The weather was warm, but it was somewhat cloudy. The bees seemed grumpy today, I am assuming that they do not like me opening their hive on a cloudy day. I have spoken with the family at the host house to see if the …
Inspecting My Top Bar Hive
I recruited help again for this inspection, I needed someone to take the pictures! I have been feeling comfortable enough to not use the smoker when I open the hives. Using the smoker feels like a big project to me. I still need practice lighting it and keeping it lit. Sometimes it works well for …
Full Inspection of Hive at Host House
I had mentioned to my husband that I needed to do an inspection of the hive that is in the host yard. We got everything ready and went over. For some reason, my husband thought shorts were acceptable to wear when opening a bee hive! Needless to say he got stung and even though I …
Honey Bees vs. The GoPro
I inspected the Top Bar hive in my yard. I used the GoPro camera, the videos are below. I had to cut them into three videos to more easily upload them to YouTube. I decided to look through all of the bars that had comb on them. The bees have 8 bars: 3 of the …
My First Real Inspection
It’s been a while since I have dedicated some time to writing a new post. I had an incident with a honey bee and have been in hiding. While I was gardening a very angry honey bee landed on my shirt. She stung me in the chest and I pulled my shirt away from my …
Home Sweet Home Part 2
On April 28th the small cell, treatment free bees arrived. The post office called me right before 8am asking me to come pick them up. Their hive was ready and I had prepared 1:1 sugar water for them. When I got to the post office, they let me know that the bees were out on …
Home Sweet Home Part 1
The bees for the top bar hive that is at the host house arrived this morning. I got up early, got everything ready, and then went to pick them up from New England Beekeeping Supplies. There were hundreds of packages of bees, many were in a trailer with a fan blowing to help cool them …
All Ready for the Bees
The new top bar hive has been built, oiled, and placed in the garden. If all goes according to plan the bees will move in toward the end of next week. I plan to number the top bars to keep track of each bar and the movements that I make with it. While I am …
The Garden
Last year was a busy time in my garden. I planted several fruit trees, blueberry bushes, raspberries, grapes, lingonberries, and more strawberries. I also added raised beds for vegetables. Then when I got the beehive, I wanted to do more pollinator friendly planting. I added some perennials that the bees prefer and I planted some spring bulbs …