Category: apiculture

The Langstroth is doing good but the top bar is raging.

Bees gorging in honey dripping from broken comb.

 

7 Frames full of brood recto verso. Looks like the queen finally took it upon herself to lay some serious egg. In the course of next week I expect the colony to triple in size which will put us on par with last season.

I installed 2 colonies today and everything went extremely well. Having done this once in the past really helped; I knew how to read the bees better and kept them very docile during the whole process.

The second package introduced into the top bar hive

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The hives in all their glory

A close-up of the new Langstroth hive this season (up-side down because iPhone)

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Busy figuring their new place out

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The weather kept me on my toes but fortunately left us alone for a good while. The rain poured heavily a couple of hours afterwards, I hope all the bees found their way inside before.

I still need to add a few decorations to make it cool. Unfortunately, the supplier has delayed delivery of the colonies by a week to allow the queens more time for their mating flight since the weather didn’t cooperate so far.

New hive, with all the bells & whistles

With plastic pierco frames, the smell of beeswax (of which the frames are coated) and pine is great

Sad doesn’t begin to describe it

Pulling what can be used, no way we’ll eat the honey.

The last stand of the last nucleus of bees, all frozen in their last action. Barely decomposed as they probably lasted until a couple of days ago when the temperatures reached -15F.

The hive helped me find my way back home from the forest on more than one occasion. On an unrelated note, I ordered a borescope to see if the bees are still alive. If they are, I will built another top bar hive for next season for sure. If not I’ll have to consider what to do.

I’m thinking about getting a snake scope to see if there’s any activity in there. I couldn’t hear anything by sticking my ear to the hive but they’ve slowed down so much I didn’t really expect to.