I'm so happy with my bees this year.
They all came out strong from the winter. 4 happy hives with 4 good queens and still plenty of honey stores. In fact, I pulled the supers and extracted quite a bit of honey.
This was my first honey to sell and I sold out in 15 minutes!!
I was so thankful since you may remember that we are horrible at selling anything. Turns out local raw honey is a different matter.
Mr. Hardin came over to help me do the first thorough inspection of the season. By the time we were done, our four hives were eleven. Eleven!! This includes the nice swarm Laney and Jess caught at the courthouse.
Eleven hives is way too many for us to have here so we took some to my in-laws and made a bee yard on the back of their property. (It's best to move bees at night.)
This has been both great and a pain at the same time. A pain because all those nucs need feed and extra attention. But great because I actually love the long walk back there. I may be singing a different tune this summer though!
Fast forward a couple of weeks. I have one hive that has gone queenless as well as the walk-away split I did. So I did something fancy and risky. I took a queen cell from another hive, cut it out, and grafted into the queenless one. As soon as the weather clears up I'll see if it worked. The other queenless one was a split and I took a whole frame from the swarm hive full of eggs and brood and I'm hoping they'll raise up a queen from there. We'll see. I also have a failed nuc which was not surprising but disappointing anyway. So now we have 10 with 2 of them looking weak.
We needed new equipment for our nucs to move into and the honey money helped.
This has been both great and a pain at the same time. A pain because all those nucs need feed and extra attention. But great because I actually love the long walk back there. I may be singing a different tune this summer though!
Fast forward a couple of weeks. I have one hive that has gone queenless as well as the walk-away split I did. So I did something fancy and risky. I took a queen cell from another hive, cut it out, and grafted into the queenless one. As soon as the weather clears up I'll see if it worked. The other queenless one was a split and I took a whole frame from the swarm hive full of eggs and brood and I'm hoping they'll raise up a queen from there. We'll see. I also have a failed nuc which was not surprising but disappointing anyway. So now we have 10 with 2 of them looking weak.
We needed new equipment for our nucs to move into and the honey money helped.
My kids helped me paint the new stuff as well as some older equipment that was getting kinda shabby.
A face lift for an old hive.
I think the bees will like this new home!
No comments:
Post a Comment