Today, we harvested 195 pounds of honey from our hives.  It is quite a bit less than the 250 pounds we had hoped.  Looking back, it seems that we overestimated how full some of the supers were, and at the time we harvested, I decided to leave more honey on the hives than I initially… Read more

Our colonies are all looking good heading into the honey harvest.  Our new queens are all laying and the population decline that occurred during the brood break has ceased as new bees hatch out.  We successfully combined hives 7 and one of our swarms and that colony is now building up.  We also caught a… Read more

We have been scrambling a bit over the past two weeks.  The hives that were left to naturally replace their queens failed to do so, we had a swarm (which we luckily caught in our swarm trap), and one of the new replacement queens we purchased flew away when released into one of our hives. … Read more

Sorry I am a bit behind with the updates. This post is from April 15, 2024 The past two weeks have been warmer which has helped our bees forage for resources and for three of our hives to produce new mated and laying queens.  Our inspection this week found Hive 7’s new queen is now… Read more

This past week has been unusually cool, and this cool weather has slowed our bees spring build up.  Last week, at the end of a week of unusually warm weather, we were able to get the hives reconfigured for the spring nectar flow and split hive 1.  Since last week, the bees have continued to… Read more

This season, we have elected to increase the number of colonies using the old-fashioned beekeeping techniques of luring and trapping swarms, relocating colonies from undesirable locations, and by dividing our colonies. The goal is to double the number of colonies we have with an aim of producing 300 pounds of honey this year and 500#… Read more