Also, Winslow helped me make a new hive stand. The more stuff I make, the more connection I feel to my past / granddad and it’s pretty great.
Quick update:
We did some serious work today (because our ladies are doing serious work still).
Our established hives are looking good and we’re planning to take off honey for the first time this year next weekend and we rearranged the supers to encourage them keep building out the new frames we put on a couple of weeks ago as well hopefully make it bit easier to get to the honey. Of course, they could just move all the honey stores and our plan may be awful. We’ll see!
But the bulk of our day was spent after our Sunday morning visit. We knew the nucs were going to need space soon the time had come to give them their extra chunk of brood box. Yeah, but we hadn’t built that junk yet.
The rest of our day was spend building the mediums and frames for each nuc, painting the box, and putting the foundation in the frames.
When we went to add those to the nucs we also changed out the oil in our IPM bottom board.
All seems in order, which terrifies me.
(First photo by Winslow Taft / thewinslowgardens)
So proud of our girls. (Taken with instagram)
the two established hives we’ve got at really kicking ass. they’ve got two honey supers packed full of honey (on top of their winter store!) and are both working on a new super on top. this is an amazing amount of honey for us, but really impressive to me as both of these hives swarmed in this early spring (sadly we didn’t catch either one, and really only noticed they swarmed at all when we noticed there was a lapse in brood production).
the two nucs are both doing well. plenty of brood. hoping to add a medium to the deep to complete their brood box very soon. maybe next week. maybe mid-week. WHO KNOWS! not me.
anyway, we’ve got way more honey than we had last year and i’ll be interested to see if we get overwhelmed or not when it comes time to extract.
Our girls have been doing work! That’s all capped honey. We have two hives with two supers packed out! (Taken with instagram)
we got two more nucs in place this week (more on that later, i’m sure). the guy we got them from seems to have been a bit absent minded when he put them together, as a shallow frame ended up in the nuc. we switched it out for a pulled deep we had already and took this one home (full of nectar/honey) but i was just amazed at how awesome natural comb is is, all the way down to the chain shape.
Here’s a really bad video of our bees flying like crazy this afternoon. Fully unedited, featuring wind noise, shaky cam, and awkward zooming!
Bee buddy!
bee reblog from my main tumblr.
bee drama lately! ugh!
We’ve been working hard on our bees this year. We may not be good at it yet, but we enjoy it. Slowly trying to put together a video project about these lovely little girls, but I’m not great at that either, so for now, here’s a still from this weekend.
Cheers!
The hives were totally ahead of what we were expecting this week. We’d planned on adding a honey super to the hive that was performing better last week, but when we got there this week the other hive was pulling ahead in terms of nectar. We ended up splitting the pulled comb frames we had from last year and putting part in each frame. Of course, that’s only nine frames, so we needed nine more to even it all out, but alas we had no frames ready to go. So…back to the house to put in some foundation! Steph took photos, so here’s Jill and me doing stuff yesterday.
More later I hope!
-C
Checked out the girls today. Both hives were working hard…saw some great pollen pants at the front door of each. Looking forward to the weekly visit on Sunday!
early morning bringing the bees home
