Yesterday we installed the bees!! Dad was nice enough to go pick them up in Stillwater on Tuesday while I was at home trying to figure out the best way to care for my newly neutered (giant 77 pound) puppy! So, that was great...he brought them over on Wednesday and we installed that evening!
Here's a little movie of our evening, you can watch below or see it HERE on our YouTube channel! Scroll down for some photos too. Here's to the 2019 season...long live the queens! :-D
The resident & visiting kiddos got a kick out of the bees in their cages!
Photo bomber! My camera stand broke so I had to prop it up in this tree, haha!
Here we are going through the old frames, deciding what to use.
Every February our boys' elementary school celebrates "I Love to Read Month!" One of the festivities is "mystery reader" day, when parents, unbeknownst to their kids, volunteer to show up one day dressed in full costume to read a book to the kids! Each parent is assigned two classrooms to visit where they read their book, and afterwards the costumed parents go on a little parade throughout the building. Naturally, this year I just had to volunteer to read a bee-related book! This was also a great excuse for me to get the new shirt/veil that I've been wanting to get, since mine was a little grimy, and a new pair of gloves because one of mine somehow became ripped after I put them away last season!
I borrowed this cute book called "Bee and Me" from my parents to read! It was just the right length for the 10-15 minutes I had, has some fun moving images as the pages turn, and in the back has a couple pages of interesting bee facts that the kids enjoyed! And of course, EVERYONE has a story of being stung by a "bee," so it was a great chance to talk about how friendly honeybees actually are! I could spend an hour at least teaching kids about bees, but this was a fun event and I had a great time!
Showing the kids how much honey one bee makes in her entire lifetime!
I brought along my smoker and the kids really loved smelling the smoky puffs of air that came out if it!
All the readers dressed up!
I really wanted to show a few pages from "Bees: A Honeyed History" which is an AWESOME book, super huge and gorgeous illustrations of all things bees!! But, time just went too quick....maybe next year!
Today we extracted honey! We were really not expecting much this year, if anything, with the struggles we had just to keep one colony alive, so it was great to have any! We ended up with about 25 pounds this year. Here's a quick video of the extracting!
On Monday this week we removed our 4 honey supers and put on some Mite Away Quick Strips (MAQS)! I haven't posted any videos since July because my GoPro has been acting up...but now mysteriously seems to be working again...just in time to catch this week's visit!
It was a rough year for our teeny tiny apiary! With one colony not making it through the winter, our Nuc order falling through, and then our queen dying in our one remaining colony, we were just happy for them to survive this summer! But, we successfully re-queened our colony, built back up the bee population, and even got a little bit of honey!
Check out this week's video, and stay tuned for this year's extraction later this fall!
Today I checked on the bees and they are putting honey in the supers which is awesome! We weren't expecting much honey if any this year. I didn't go too deep into the brood chambers so as not to disturb the queen, but went just far in enough on the top box to catch a video of a baby bee hatching! Super cool! My GoPro appears to be crapping out on me, so I took off a glove and used my iphone for this one. Enjoy!
Last Friday I checked the bees and found some capped brood in the top box! I didn't have a lot of time that day and that was really all I needed to see, so I closed 'er up! Woohoo...this means the new queen has been accepted and is laying!!! Best news ever! Unfortunately my GoPro crapped out on me so I didn't get any of the video I thought I got.
Today my dad came up and we checked some more. We found more eggs, larvae and capped brood in the top and middle box. So, not sure which box the queen is in. We didn't see any in the bottom, so we swapped the top and bottom box. Since the queen tends to move up, this will give her space to lay more eggs in the top. We also swapped out a couple frames of funky comb with some empty frames with drawn comb. While the colony was queenless, they spent their time packing more honey and pollen into the cells and building weird comb. This of course didn't leave much empty comb for the queen to lay in. So, today we saw some weird frames with little patches here and there of eggs & brood. Hopefully she'll work her way up to the empty frames and fill in a nice pattern of brood! We should have some new workers hatching real soon too, which will help increase numbers, and provide more bees to build more comb for her to lay in. Here's a video from today:
We are so behind now, when we should have tons of bees, because we had to re-queen the hive. Since they were queenless for so long, their numbers dwindled instead of multiplying. So, it's pretty unlikely that we'll get much honey this year, if any at all. This year will likely just be a "keep the bees alive" season as we work to build the colony back up, and hope to get them through winter for another chance next year.
Unfortunately due to the "catastrophic event" that happened with the guy we pre-ordered a nuc from, we are not going to get any bees into our second hive either. However, I did sign myself up with the MN hobby beekeepers' directory of beekeepers willing to capture a swarm. SO, if some poor soul finds a swarm of bees has landed in their backyard on the west side of the cities, we may just get lucky and have a chance to try capturing some "freebees!!" Now THAT would make for a great vide! Fingers crossed! Till next time, here are a couple shots from my iphone today!
Today I made a quick stop to remove the duct tape from the end of the new queen's cage! She has been in there for two days now so the bees are hopefully getting used to her scent. I could definitely tell a difference in the mood of the bees this time...they sounded pretty angry the last couple times, but a lot more mellow today. I'm gonna tell myself it's because they are so happy to have a new queen in the hive! Haha!
From what I've read, if the queen cage is being mobbed by bees and they won't go away when you brush them off, the likelihood they will cluster around her and kill her when she's released is high, and you should keep her in there longer. But, they seemed fine with me brushing them off today and didn't come back, so I think they are getting accustomed to her.
I put the sugar syrup back on in case they need more now for building comb and caring for future brood...we'll see if they take any this week.
