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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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

Since my last post, I have inspected the majority of my hives. On Sunday June 8th, we inspected hives a Burr Farm. I enlisted help of my husband to do the heavy lifting. BF#1 looks good and had plenty of signs of a laying queen, so I was happy with that. There was some weight…

I’m seeing positive results with these past two week’s inspections of my bees. I didn’t check every hive , just the ones that concerned me the most. Hives #6 and #8, I saw capped brood and larva in various of stages, I must have missed the eggs upon my last inspection. Hive #7, I saw…