Bee Update

Hey Guys here is just a quick bee update. We opened all three hives today and when I opened mine I was in trouble. Mistake #1...of this year. When I took out the queen cage I was stupid enough not to put a frame back in its place. So the bees took the liberty to fill one in. Ha Ha. Here are some pictures of what happened it wasn't pretty. This is on the inner cover by the way.

You also see that I looked puzzled. Well that is because I was trying to figure out what to do with it. So I moved it off to the side not wanting to remove it because I did not find the queen and had a feeling she was on there. Also I have some pictures and the size of the colony is amazing. My hive, my dad swears, is twice the size of his. The colony should be dwindling down a bit by now so that is why I was surprised.

Bees

So looking at my other posts I found out that I did not tell you that my bees died over this spring. So we think that they were so small of a cluster they didn't want to go to the top box to eat the honey. Well we have new bees now. We enjoyed it so much that we got three this year. One is of course mine the other is my Dad's (and Mom's) and the third is my Brother's which he won. We just got the bees yesterday. It was amazing. I got stung yesterday when one bee was crawling up my shorts. That was not amazing. Lets just say it was very uncomfortable. Rule #1 Never wear shorts without rubber bands around the legs. Today we ended up believing Nick had a robbing attack because we put the feeder on the top of the bars. Well the thing is about a top bar hive is that the lid isn't really a full blown lid. The lids only purpose is to protect the bees from the elements. There are holes on each side of the lid. The other two are plugging away just fine. I will go ahead and post another in about 1-2 days when we get in to see if the queen has been released.

Good Resource

For those of you that have kids then The Honey Files is a good science resource. There is a little evolution in it but you can skip over that.

Long time no post

Hello everyone it has been a long time since I have posted anything. It is beekeeping season again and I will try to get more posts out. My brother won a top bar hive from the Utah County Beekeepers Association and will get his equipment April 7 and his bees April 28. It will bee a new adventure for us because we have never had a top bar hive before. Please Comment if you have heard any tips about this hive.

Thanks,
Mitchell

P.S. I will not post anything this week because I will be at a Debate Tournament in Spokane, Washington this week.