Snug as Bugs
We’ve been keeping an ear to our ladies this winter. Mr Chiots heads out after each snow fall and makes sure the doors are clear of snow and he scrapes away and dead bees from the entrance. He puts his ear up the hives and listens for that buzzing of bees beating their wings to keep warm. Both of our hives are still buzzing away, one’s louder than the other.
During winter, the worker bees cluster around the queen and brood in the hive. They try to keep the temperature at about 90 degrees. The bees from the outer parts of the cluster will move to the inside as the bees from the inside move out. This way all the bees stay warm throughout the cold winter. On warmer days they’ll take cleansing flights, basically to go to the bathroom. We haven’t had any days warm enough for such flights yet, but we may have one in the next few weeks. We’ll be watching the hives to see what happens come spring.
We’re hoping to have a good honey harvest this coming summer if both of our hives survive. Learning how bees work really makes me appreciate the honey I put in my tea, it’s amazing what they go through to make it!
What kind of foods do you appreciate that take such intricacy to produce?
Stretching their Wings
It’s been raining a lot here lately and our poor bees get a little restless when they can’t leave the hive. When we have a warm sunny day we see them all over the gardens. It’s kind of funny because we usually don’t see our bees in the garden, I see a lot of solitary bees, and on occasion a honey bee. But now that it’s getting colder I’ve seen a lot of our bees in the gardens.
I especially see them around water sources getting drinks. They love Lucy’s bowl in the front lawn. I put some leaves in it so they don’t drown.
If you don’t have water sources for beneficial insects, consider added a small basin filled with sand or straw to you garden. Make sure you replace the water frequently so as not to breed mosquitos. You’ll be rewarded with lots of beneficials flitting around your gardens.
Have you noticed more bees as fall is coming or fewer?
Filed under Bees, Beneficial, Insects, beekeeping | Comments (6)Hello World
Here’s a new bee emerging from it’s cell, not something you see every day.
One of the great thing about gardening and beekeeping is that we get to see things many people don’t.
Have you seen anything amazing recently in your garden?
Filed under beekeeping | Comments (18)Checking on the Our Hive Split
Yesterday we went out and checked our two hives. We wanted to make sure the old hive was still doing well and thriving, and they are (time to put on a new box for them).
We also wanted to make sure the new queen had been accepted and was going to work laying eggs and building the new hive, and she was. We were able to spot eggs, larvae and new capped brood in the new hive. That means our queen is hard at work and she’s no longer living in a tiny box, she’s got a whole hive to rule over.
Because we split our hive we won’t be able to harvest any honey this year. It’s the honey harvesting season right now, so we’ll be searching out a local beekeeper to buy some all-natural local honey from!
Do you buy local honey?
Filed under Bees, Beneficial, Insects, beekeeping | Comments (13)Crazy New Beekeepers
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know we’re new beekeepers. We got our first hive back in April. We’ve been checking on the bees regularly and they’re doing quite well.
The week before last Mr Chiots checked on the bees one day while I was gone and he got stung. He looked inside the hive and didn’t see any eggs so he got worried that our queen was MIA. He called Dave, the guy we got our bees off of, for some advice and Dave suggested requeening the hive. So we ordered up a new queen. We were hoping to get an Ohio Queen Project Queen, but the guy we wanted to buy from was out of queens for the year. So we ordered up another lovely Italian lady.
We got the queen. We decided to do one more hive check to see what was going on inside. Low and behold the hive was bustling with activity and the queen was in there doing her job laying eggs and everything looked just like it should. We called Dave and he suggested requeening anyways, which would involve catching and killing our old queen. We didn’t really want to do that because she’s been such a great queen so far, so we decided to do what any crazy beekeepers would do, we decided to split our hive.
We ran out and bought the few things we needed and went about splitting our hive. Basically when you split a hive you take some of the bees from the orginal hive and put them in a new hive with the new queen. You leave her in her cage for a few days so the bees accept her as theirs and then you release her and you’ve got yourself another hive of bees.
Now of course, nothing is as simple or as easy and it sounds on paper or in our heads. There are a lot of steps involved in splitting the hive, the most tedious task being finding the old queen to make sure she’s not in the frames you move over to the new hive.
After searching and searching we finally found her (she is unmarked). She was of course not in the same spot she’s been every other time we’ve checked our hive, which made us a little nervous at first. But we finally found her and put her safe and sound back into her old hive.
The smoker comes in quite handy during these times since it keeps the bees occupied while you’re trying to work. Since we were in the hive for so long looking for the queen we were glad we had it around.
We then moved some frames over to the new hive and put the new queen cage in. Dave suggested we wait 4 days to release her, so today’s the day we plan on doing that. If they accept her, which they should, we’ll how have hive #2 at Chiot’s Run. The one thing we have to worry about is that both of our hives can build up enough reserves of honey and pollen for the winter. We plan on feeding them some sugar syrup through the dry nectar flow in July-Aug so give them the best chance of survival.
So we now have 2 hives at Chiot’s Run. We hope they both are strong going in to winter, if not we may combine them again for better winter survival chances. We haven’t even named the first one and now we have another.
Have you ever done anything crazy where you had no idea what you were doing but went ahead and jumped in with both feet?
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