It has been a busy month since our last update. We have re-queened all our colonies, entered our honey in the Arlington County Fair, and have removed a colony of feral honeybees from a tree near the home of a family with small children. All this along with the routine chores of inspecting, feeding and manipulating our bees.
We have chosen to follow the practice of many commercial beekeepers to re-queen our colonies every year. We have chosen to use two methods. For half of our colonies, we removed the existing queen and allowed the colony to produce a new queen on their own. For the other half of our colonies, we purchased replacement queens from three different queen breeders in Virginia. We selected these queens based on the breeder’s reputation for producing productive, hygienic, and gentle bees.
We have entered our honey in the comb, strained and black jar divisions of the honey department at the Arlington County Fair. We will know Sunday August 18, 2024 how we did. Wish us luck!
We received news this past month of a feral colony of honeybees that took up residence in a tree in the corner of a yard that adjoins neighboring property belonging to a family with small children. The owners, after careful consideration, decided to ask us to relocate the colony to our apiary. Using a vacuum and a honeybee repellant, we drove most of the bees from the tree and then vacuumed them up. We left a bait hive near the entry way in the tree and, over the next several weeks, collect the remaining bees from the colony.