Gee's Bees, LLC

Have you ever been handed a frame of bees to hold while your spouse tries to catch a new queen for marking on it? Me neither at least until today. Being a model of coordination & steadiness I grabbed a hold of the side rails and most bees made way, one did not. Typical fury of a scorned woman, that one bee gave up her life to show me her displeasure in being manhandled. Atypical of me I had to take this assault on my left pointer finger in a stoic fashion so as not to be the target of the wraith of the real woman of the apiary, diligently trying to put a white dot on the thorax of a 2021 matriarch.  Being a beekeeper the number one question you get asked always involves stings. How many? How often? Where? and my personal favorite "Have you ever?". Non-beekeepers really don't appreciate the true amount of stings we get. I will say the more experience you gain the sting count does go down, but it's still a fairly regular occurrence. On a beautiful sunny afternoon on...

Mike Tyson beekeeping again 1 . We had planned on putting the honey supers on today to take advantage of any early nectar flow. We even went so far as to stage all the boxes and to make sure they had properly drawn out comb. After inspecting (2) hives it became painfully obvious that these gals are light. With populations getting to almost critical levels (I'm looking at you Hive 008/25), we decided that it was too much of a risk that these hives would starve out. So we scrapped the supering plan, continued to cycle the brood above the excluder, and put some additional weak syrup on them (with spirulina). We'll reassess, next weekend. It looks like last week's freeze set the Holly Bushes back. All the blooms are now black, so we'll wait on those. Plus our Dogwood hasn't started blooming in earnest yet. We did find a few swarm cells in Hive 008/25. We did a cut-down split starting a 5 frame nuc with the queen (008). We left one good-looking cell with the parent colon...