Musings of an Unseasoned Beeman

I finally put up the last cabinet door on Saturday, and today was rainy, so we decided to get going on putting the hive together.  Will started by helping glue the supers up while I put the pieces together.  Alexa and Will both helped nail the supers together.
After we put the brood supers together, Will [...]

We received our package from BetterBee – replacing the damaged cover and screened bottom board.  Will was anxious to get to putting the hive together, so we went downstairs and put one of the honey supers together.  Hopefully after the weekend, the shop will be cleaned up and ready for some hive building!

After a visit to the dentist, Alexa and I got off to an early start for bee school.  Alexa decided that dinner would be at Denny’s for some pancakes – one of her favorite stops.
Tonight’s program was on protective equipment and hive assembly.  I’m still up in the air whether I need a jacket – [...]

UPS dropped 75 lbs of wood and assorted bits and pieces of beekeeping material on our doorstep this morning.  We opened it up, and took inventory – a little damage – we had a broken screened bottom board and a chip out of the cover, but those items can be remedied easily enough.
Looks like a [...]

Happy Birthday, Alexa!  It’s Alexa’s birthday, and bee school day #3.  I’ve asked her if she’s going to come with me about 100 times, and each time the answer was NO.  However, after opening presents and Grandma & Grandpa’s house, and I was getting ready to leave, the answer changed to YES!
Turns out that if [...]

A few (or more) items I’ve found interesting in my bee education:

bees are pretty docile when not in the hive or protecting the hive
95+% of all bees in the hive are female
a worker bee has a barbed stinger, the queen has a straight stinger
the lone males of the hive, the drones, have no stinger
a worker [...]

Presumably, these 10,000 bees will want a home when then arrive in Palmer, MA.  Since I doubt that letting them live in our house will fly with Margaret, I’ve been doing a lot of bee hive hunting.  Fortunately, Alexa picked up every catalog and flyer that was present last weeks bee school.
After debating the merits [...]

With Margaret off to NH for a long scrapbooking weekend, I got to bring both of the kids to bee school!  Oddly enough, Will was very interested in attending – could Alexa have spilled the beans about refreshments?
Armed with a backpack full of Kid K’nex and some webkinz, we played and listened to the talk [...]

After scouring the internet for some beekeeping education, the next logical step was our local library.  I requested up a copy of Beekeeping for Dummies from another library, and and today I got to work on becoming ‘not so dumb about beekeeping as I was yesterday’.

Where to start…where to start??  Cursed with a brain wired for engineering,  I had all kinds of questions on how to get going.  Perusing the internet cleared up some things, but becoming  overwhelmed with information and ideas was leading to paralysis.
So, it was serendipitous that I hosted a geocaching event shortly after I found out about [...]