Thursday, April 26, 2012

Bee School

So where have I been lately?  Bee school - which is not as the name implies for bees, but for beekeepers. I got to hawk shirts in all these great colors.

I will be happy to hand off this job to the fabulous Liz Jo next year who will do a bang up job. I am going to be looking for another volunteer opportunity in the club. After three years of folks asking what size their husband or wife (who is not present) would wear or, this year for the first time, what size do they wear, I am ready to be done.

This is one deeply amusing job - fodder for many an amusing conversation with my non-beekeeper friends.

 I brought my 8 year old daughter on the last day. We were learning about the pollen and nectar producing plants of Worcester County. Very interesting list and fed her interest in botany.

As you put in your spring flowers, think of the bees. Choose native plants as often as you can. Leave a section of your yard to grow wild if you can. And leave the pesticides/insecticides at the store.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Sunshine and a new hive

Today was the day. I split the hives. Sun's hive had made a supercedure cell - which means that they were thinking about making a new queen. Hello! She is awesome but they might have felt a bit crowded. So I solved two problems at once.

I was looking carefully at the frames to see if there were any drones. With my nose only a few inches from the bees I saw one big bee and thought A-HA a drone! Duh. It was the queen!  She looked great by the way. She was just as golden an unlined as I recalled. Wish I had the camera.

I moved two frames of bees and three frames of honey to an empty box. There were capped drone cells so there should be drones by the time the bees make a new queen. 

The bees got some empty frames and a couple of foundation frames. They need to build out new frames so I can toss out the old yucky ones.

I a few weeks I will need a new queen name so start thinking now!