Author: dwelsch76
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Spring has Sprung! I am busy and so are the Bees!
Shortly after my last post, there was a warm day on the last day of February. It was sunny day and the temperatures reached into the 50s. It was a perfect day to look into the tops of the hives and see what was left of their food stores. It was also a new experience…
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Brrrr! It had been cold! How are the bees surviving?
I have been worried with the temperatures being so cold for weeks. I don’t recall temperatures being this cold in the past, but part of that could be that I haven’t been keeping bees for that long and during that time we had a few mild winters, which may have spoiled me a bit. I…
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Winter Preparations – Keeping the Bees Healthy
For one that doesn’t keep honeybees, they may think that the responsibilities of keeping those bees ends when the flowers are no longer in bloom. I have had many people ask me if my bees are all snug in a rug like a bug but, it doesn’t end there, not by any means. If the…
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Going into the Fall
Since my last post, the new queen was accepted into hive #4. We pulled the honey supers off of all of the hives. There was very little capped honey from my hives here, and nothing from Burr Farm. I was hopeful that the rain at that time would help the flowers to produce nectar, but…
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Update after the Yellow Jackets
A few weeks ago, I checked on hive #4. I wanted to see if there was any queen activity in the upper brood box. The bees have been filling that with sugar water/nectar and there was no queen activity. So I asked my husband to assist me with taking the upper brood box off so…
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The Yellow Jacket Battle Continues
The following day, I noticed the yellow jackets going through the space of the screened bottom board and the monitoring board on hive #8. I decided to do more preventative measures. On a side note, in my last post, I failed to mention that I did place entrance reducers on each of the hives to…
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It is Yellow Jacket Season
I have noticed during my years of keeping bees, that the late summer and early fall, that the populations of yellow jacket wasps are stronger compared to spring and early summer here in Connecticut. Yellow jackets are known to attack bee colonies and I had concerns about 3 hives at the top of my hill.…
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Bees and the Birds
On Saturday, July 19th, I put out my centrifuges/frame spinners, cone tank, and the honey wax cappings bin for the bees to rob. Within the hour, there was a fury of bees on the cappings trying gathering all of the honey that was left on them. They were knocking off big chunk of wax off…
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Honey is Available
On the 4th of July, we decided to check the honey supers that I had on 3 of my hives and add brooding boxes to the two hives that I have at Burr Farm. We harvested 17 frames from the original hive that we placed at Burr Farm and we also harvested 17 frames from…
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Merges, Swarms, and Splits
On June 13th, I merged hives #7 and #6. The process that I used is to use a piece of newspaper to separate the two brood boxes. I cut slits in the newspaper to allow the queen pheromone to pass from hive #6 brood box to hive #7. The bees will slowly chew through the…