Blog
Behold the power of open brood
We hived two packages of bees on May 12 and everything looked fine. Until the next day: one package had pretty much absconded and joined up with the other. So, we now had a fresh hive with a double-complement of bees. No idea what happened to the queen. Everybody seemed happy, so we left them alone.
Fast forward one week. I popped out to the yard for quick peek and was greeted with this. That’s about 3/4 of the population of the colony hanging about on the bottom. Scouts were out an about looking for a place to move and the only comb inside the hive was loaded with nectar. No brood, not chance of a replacement queen. I couldn’t do anything about it, though: the bees seem to know in advance how I’m going to be dressed for a visit and act accordingly. I wasn’t about to try to convince an absconding colony to stay wearing shorts and sandals.
Take me out to the bee park!
Things got a bit lively in the home dugout during a Colorado Rockies/Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game yesterday. The game was temporarily suspended because a swarm decided that one of the posts on the dugout rail would be a good place to gather.
Bee day is almost here!
It’s been a strange spring in our neck of the woods. We had a big dose of June temperatures in early March, then back to normal temps. Then, up and down for a couple of weeks and finally back to normal again. It feels like we’ve neglected the ladies, but the reality is that the weather’s been so weird we didn’t want to mess around.
Until tomorrow. A good friend of mine attended our April workshop and caught bug, so to speak. She’s picking up two packages of bees (plus two for us) in Peterborough tomorrow and I’ll be meeting her to help hive them. Over the course of the next month or so, we’ll be setting up a number of new hives and re-populating dead-outs.
Workshop Powerpoint
The powerpoint presentationfor the Intro course will be uploaded this week. The videos will be removed to help with the file size so if you want those as well, please email us and we can send you links.
A Big Thank-you!
Gord and I just want to send a BIG THANK-YOU to all those that attended the Introduction to Sustainable Beekeeping workshop yesterday. It went very well; lots was learned & shared; and the food was totally delicious!
We could not have done this without everyone’s participation and we look forward to doing more in the future!
When you buy honey, is it really?
Probably not if you buy it from a store, according to Food Safety News:
More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn’t exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for Food Safety News.
The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled “honey.” The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world’s food safety agencies.