The good swarm
I discovered an unexpected benefit to negligence when a very large swarm found some of my equipment sitting around unoccupied. The hive bodies stacked in my yard awaiting a fresh […]
Category Archives: Queens
What did you do in the bee yard today? April 17, 2017
The last three years’ early, unseasonably warm springs have given way to our more “normal” rainy weather this year. I’ve hesitated to interrupt the couple of good foraging days we’ve […]
Fun with Queens
In the course of making my inspections over the past couple of weeks, I noted that my largest, strongest colonies still had significant drone populations. In my little valley, we […]
Moving Day, August 5, 2016
As I finally made my rounds after my month of travel, I discovered the colony at this out-yard was a dead-out. After a month, it’s a little difficult to say […]
Equalizing
It felt great to finally be doing some serious hive inspections after a very wet spring break. Most of my colonies so far are looking pretty good, but I came […]
What did you do in the bee yard today? August 9, 2015
It’s the season to streamline my bee yard. This colony failed to requeen itself after a split, so I combined it with a queenright nuc made from a spring split. […]
Retinue…check!
In times when some beekeepers are reporting less-than-impressive retinue behavior, that “She is the center of our universe” attention given to the queen by worker bees, I was pretty happy […]
