For your edification and delight, here’s some titillating footage of our bee package installation. It’s a kenyan top bar classic sure to amaze friends and family.

One week after installing a new package, we opened up our hive and found:

• tons of honey
• 2 new combs
• some larvae
• no queen
• no new brood
• 2 supercedure cells

Methinks the queen has disappeared. We didn’t remove the supercedure cells thinking that maybe the workers are trying to raise a new one but at the end of the day we’re utter newbies. Clueless.

I’ve got an email into TJ for advice. In the meantime, the only consolation is that I tasted my first homegrown honey today and it was divine.

Continue reading ‘Queenless?’

44% of all the U.S. bees died last winter. Again, doing the math, that comes to 1.1 million colonies, just shy of what’s needed for almond pollination next spring. Hmmmm….
from ‘Colony Collapse Disorder: What We’ve Learned’

In the article above, Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine, seems to conclude Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) has something to do with it.

Yesterday evening, I checked on the queen.

Activity around the hive had settled into a normal pattern, but I wanted to make sure she’d been freed from her cage properly. At sunset, A. and I opened the hive (my first opening without the patient oversight of TJ) to find that she was nearly freed but not quite. We smoked off her attendants and peeled back the mesh.

Queen Natasha (as I’ve just now decided to call her) skittered down into the hive without a moment’s hesitation. There was plenty of nectar already filling the comb and Natasha’s crew were busy and docile.

So far so good.

Here’s another lesson from the Albuquerque bee man, TJ, and his rooftop hives.

Comb filled with tight even worker brood like this is pure eye candy for the beekeeper opening her hives in Spring. Lots of worker brood means a strong workforce able to harvest spring nectar.

At my place in the city of Albuquerque, the girls will find nectar from a variety of trees such as apricot, elm, honey locust, and a variety of other flowering fruit trees maintained by urban gardeners. Thought, this year, my girls arrived late (I just received my package a couple of days ago) TJ’s bees have been hard at work for over a month. In fact, when I snapped the photo shown above, his girls were already bringing in honey and the gray pollen characteristic of elm trees. It’s the start of a rockin’ year for the hive.

I started my first urban beehive today with the help of a nucleus colony ordered from Texas and the advice of local bee sage, TJ.

Here’s the story.

Continue reading ‘It’s bee day’

Like a lady in waiting, here’s my hive. Tomorrow its occupants arrive, all 10,000 of ‘em. I’m so juiced, I can barely sleep.

Up on old man TJ’s roof where he keeps three hives in Albuquerque, I began my education.

This here’s a keen picture (TJ frequently peppers his speech with the word “keen”) illustrating the difference between brood and honey.

Drone brood pops up out the comb to accommodate the larger size of drone larvae. Later this week, I’ll post an annotated photo of worker brood so that you can see the difference.

Drone brood is fine. You want some drone brood in your hive, but too much and you won’t have enough workers to gather honey and maintain the hive. Too much drone brood might also be a sign that your queen is failing.

As if a bee swarm itself weren’t enough to turn a day bad, Jack from the Self-Sufficient Steward experienced a double-whammy this week.

So, I flunk basic beekeeping once - preempting the swarm is pretty rudimentary stuff and I blew it. But now I have a chance to really earn my beekeeping merit badge by capturing the swarm in the hive body I had prepared to split the colony. So I scramble around, calling in to some experienced beekeepers for advice and re-reading the ‘capturing the swarm’ section.

Then I hustle back out a full ten minutes later, ready for my trial by fire, to find….an empty branch.

Read more at the Self-Sufficient Steward

I can never get enough insect diagrams