Musings of an Unseasoned Beeman

On Sunday, I decided to pull the hive top feeder off in order to remove the mold that had started growing.  When I attempted to remove the divider (which separates the bees from the syrup), I saw that the entrance to the feeder was chock full of comb.
And how is it no one had mentioned [...]

Wow! What a weekend! The bees are in heaven, as it’s 80+ degrees, and they are really active today after having a cool week.
I opened up the hive for our 2nd inspection, and things were continuing to go well. The frames are further drawn out into comb, but more impressive is the [...]

When people hear that I started keeping bees, they often ask me about colony collapse disorder (CCD), the name given to the problem of disappearing bees. To date, a lot of theories as to what causes CCD have been floated, but there’s been no ’smoking gun’ discovered.
This month’s Scientific American (April [...]

Today was the big day.  The first hive inspection, and a chance to see what the bees have been up to.  I had been a little worried about the bees, as they hadn’t seemed to have taken much of the last batch of syrup, and despite it being overcast, and an occasional sprinkle, I wanted [...]

Today was the final day of bee school – the one Alexa’s been waiting for!   The entire crew came to the class, though that didn’t work very well, as the lights were dim, and Will was rummaging through Legos, making far too much noise, so Margaret and Will ended up in the hall reading [...]

This morning, I went out to check on the bees – no activity outside, but I put my ear up to the hive, and could hear the telltale buzzing going on inside, so all was well…
The bees that were left in the box were declared dead – or extremely sleepy – but to be sure, [...]

Bee Day is finally here!  I’m excited, the kids are excited, and it’s finally time to install the package of bees in the hive.  Mike graciously offered to pickup my bees from Autumn Morning Farm in Barre, MA, so I could go to work.
After work, I met him at his home in Brimfield, and he [...]

Since we had family visiting from Muskegon, MI, this week, Alexa and I skipped out on Bee School, Day 6, which I believe was to cover spring/summer management and honey extraction.
However, we were lucky enough to attend Friday’s regular WBCA meeting which was a potluck dinner and featured 6 speakers whom were each relatively new [...]

With the impending arrival of the Vaughan Clan from Muskegon tomorrow, Alexa and I had to get most of the hive building out of the way, as the bees arrive one week from tomorrow and we didn’t know how much time we’d have to devote to the hive building this coming week.
Yesterday, I had primed [...]

Bee School, Day 5 was supposed to be on hive management, broken into two different talks, spring/summer and fall/winter, however due to an absence, the first talk was switched to next week’s swarm prevention and queens.  Gus Skamarycz has talked before on sources of bees, and while he’s very well versed in all things bee, [...]