Things have been getting better in the backyard since we put up the screen across the perennial garden. There are fewer bees flying low in the yard. I have been able to spend more time out there, which has been good for me and my garden. Now that I am feeling a little more confident, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …