way too long

Don't think we've forgotten about you bee blog! I'm just one lazy mamajama. Last year the camera broke during my first attempt at a hive removal and we just recentlly got another one. I hated the idea of posting without pictures so we got a ton for some catch up. The hive removal was a complete failure as the bees from the hive not only absconeded and abandoned their new home - they also took out my first swarm from eariler (the one where I found the queen on the blue tarp!). So very very disapointing year last year for bee accumulation...no swarm calls and the one swarm I did get failed. I did however get compensated for all the work at the apartment complex and even though the bees all died and I could salvage nothing from it; it was a valuable learning experience and the extra funds helped compensate a bit for some extra hive equipment I purchased eariler. Its still winter-time but we got a nice week long warm-up so the bees were flying around a little bit..one of the hives is more active than the other so I am a little concerned there but I'm going to wait a few more months until we are good into spring to really open them up and poke around.

**gunna throw in some pics of the chickens and some deer too!**

First Swarm

Last week we got our first swarm for this year - and it was right next to our apiary; only.... 20 feet up!

Heres how we went about this one. I set up 3 medium boxes about 10 feet from the swarm..which was also about 10 feet from the other hives. Because of the location of this swarm I couldn't really get up there and safely cut the branch and ease it down. Even on top of the ladder I was still nowhere near where I needed to be. Time to try out our new swarm bucket. Its just a 5 gal bucket affixed to two 5 foot segments of pvc pipe joined with a coupling. I like the idea of this allot but the bucket wasn't very secure which made maneurving it near the swarm a little nerve racking. In addition to the bucket we also had to use a rope to swing over the branch and give us the leverage we needed to shake the swarm. Our goal at first was to do it in one clean jerking motion but instead it took us five attempts to get the majority of the swarm into a bucket and placed into the hive. Every time I got rain'd on... not by softly cudly water.. but instead by my cute little bee friends!

On the 2nd attempt I was lucky enough to find the queen - and capture the moment on VIDEO! That was a first for me and altought looking at the video it looks planned I sware it was not. For the first few rainy days I had the top of the hive open to encourage the bees I missed to come in, then I tried closing the top off but they did not like that. They are still making some strange digging/scrating noise like they are trying to get out and until yesterday the were not really using the bottom entrance. Before we left yesterday for Mothers-day events we took two of the three boxes off and left it as one.. 98% of the bees were in the top one all to the left side. This morning I checked on them and they were still making the sound, but also using the bottom entrance like the other hives normally do.  The last thing I noticed today was that the hive on the far right was VERY loud and had lots of action out front...no bearding...just lots flying in front very noisey. We'll see what happens next!

Extra Pics

 

April Flowers

Not that many Spring showers just yet; but beautiful flowers, chickens, and bees... Which means lots of pics for you!! Today was especially nice out so I spent some time wandering around taking closeups of the flowers and in particular the white plum trees right by our front door. The bees are ALL OVER this stuff. I'm almost a little scared to spend too much time around these trees because you can really hear the bees buzzing. As we sit in our living room we can see them as they go about their work. I didn't get any real good pics of the bumble bees but they are out there too..they keep banging their heads on the living room window to get my attention.

The chicken coop should be all done this weekend. When Dingo gets back from work today were going to paint the sides and get things ready for her grandfather tomorrow to come with his tools and the rest of the wood we cut and pieced together on Easter. We originally were going to make a large square coop, that seemed simple enough... but I bought the wrong kind of wood and my woodworking skills are nil..so it was not very stable. I took it apart and we went to get the right wood and found some plans on the internet for a basic A-Frame style coop which will fit our needs nicely. Having Dingo's Dad and Grandfather helping construct it was a big help. We'll get some pics of the chickens in their new home when its all done.We did an inspection before Easter and things are looking good for the two remaining hives. We saw allot of larvae in different stages..some fully developed some just starting out in their combs. I must have accidentally hit on of the bees when I was moving the frames around because we found a bee walking around without his abdomen. My friends at beemaster.com said it happens all the time but it sure did take me by surpise when I saw it..just a bee head and wings running around the frame. There are a

 few good solid frames of honey but I am going to wait until after the spring buildup to take anything from them for my first harvest.. I'm excited but I've waited this long so no hurry! As a bonus - I made a video ~2 mins of the bees going in and out of their hive. ENJOY!

Accidents happen, week #2

Well accidents happen and we have a tough lesson learned. One of the chics died today so we are down to the original three that we anticipated. One of our dogs got in the brooder and her instinct kicked in. We wanted to take some new pictures of them today so here are some updates! We noticed allot of their wing feathers are starting to grow out. Its amazing how fast they seem to be growing. In another few weeks I bet they will be ready to go outside.

Were still working on getting the coop together. I'm pretty solid on a basic square design but I like this triangle design too. I already bought the screen for it so we just gotta get some lumber together, cut up the pieces and put it together.

From Bees to Chickens?

I guess bees were not enough because Shark decided he wanted to have chickens. He set up an appointment to go pick up some chicks last Saturday, 3/14. The guy we got the chicks from lived only about 5 minutes away. We could tell we were getting close to his house when there we chickens all over the road. The guy had to have about 100+ chickens at his house. He was a crazy chicken man.

The original deal was for three chicks; however, when we got there he had four in a box, so it was hard to say no.

One is going to be a white foghorn leghorn type chick which lays white eggs. The other three will be a surprise, but should lay brown eggs. Next step, build a chicken coop. I wonder how many of these chickens will end up being roosters?

Here are some pictures of the chicks the day we brought them home!

Spring 09' has Sprung

Man am I glad Spring is finally here! Its actually been spring time for a few weeks now, but the weather has really improved this past week. The forecast looks 50+ and today we got to go out and took a peak! Both hives seem healthy but we lost the tree hive. I think I'm gonna keep it around for aesthetic value because it was a fun story. I decided to get a good scrapping of honey while we were inspecting them and put it in an empty plastic butter dish. The honey looks really dark, so I don't know what kind of honey it is, but it taste great! The wildflower honey I remember seeing/tasting from my mentors place was really light in color and tasted light too.. this was much more flavorful and creamy even.

I didn't see any brood but maybe its just too early for that. We only went two boxes deep so I did not look in the bottom box, I suspect that is where the majority of the bees and brood are at. In both hives they seemed to be building in only 1/4 of the boxes and going up. There were a few frames on the outside packed with sealed honey in both hives (middle box) but in the top boxes there were frames that didn't even have foundation drawn on them yet, completely blank. I suspect in a few weeks/months they will build up their colony and I'll have to put another box on but for now it seems like they got all the space they need.

From my rough estimation I think I'd be safe to take maybe 4 frames of sealed honey from both hives if I wanted to. I'm not going to yet, gunna have to ask some people at beemaster.com to find out for sure ... but I'd like to try to do the "crush and strain" method of honey collection first...so I'm excited to do that soon.

Today was great, after the inspection allot of the bees followed us to the garage area and our dogs were playing with them. Everyone seemed to have a good time..bees getting the little drops of honey from my gloves and on the ground were focused on that so we could take lots of pictures. While they were busy doing that we decided to practice MARKING so we captured a few and tried it out. Someday I'll have to start keeping track of queens ^^