🍃 Spring Is Here

-


Spring is in the air, and it's officially here according to the calendar. B made a post and has even generated some more honey sales. It's going to be close whether we sell all of last year's honey. I think the least count was 30 lbs left. I'm betting we will, and she was hard-fast against that we will, although I'm starting to see some cracks in the stance now. Speaking of Sales... We've sold, We have sold 47 lbs so far this year for a total of $452 or  $9.62/lb. Not too shabby for off-season sales. 

It's good having the apiary back and some resemblance of a plan now. I was getting a bit stressed about the state of affairs, but after this weekend feel better about our queen status, the number of hives, and especially the number of bees. I wish we could put supers on now, these hives are packed. 




Location: Colfax, NC, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

🌨️ Batten Down The Hatches

-
Image
  A storm is approaching, making all-weather outlets a twitter.  Winter Storm Izzy  is supposed to drop up to 14" of snow on us Friday Saturday  Sunday. Complete pandemonium with rain, snow, sleet, or ice. Or nothing at all. Media is the media and death and destruction sell newspapers or promote clicks. So if there isn't a problem they will create one. Written through a COVID cough. Regardless, after the tree falling incident , we decided we should strap down the hives. So the can be Weebles  https://youtu.be/qq0OQBdIhsc . Except they may fall down, but hopefully won't split apart. Oh, and another book finished:  The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild by   Thomas D. Seeley Matt Gee 's review Jan 12, 2022   ·    edit it was amazing Read 2 times. Last read September 23, 2021 to January 12, 2022. My Private Notes:   (shown only to you) Great account of bees in the wild and how we can implement practices ...
Read more

🙈 Inspection - No Supers, Yet

-
Image
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...
Read more

🥂 Making Mead

-
Image
We've been intimidated by making mead even though they have been making it since 7000 BC  and in its simplest form, it is only 3 ingredients (Honey, Water, & Yeast). So we decided to try it, following the Bug Farmers video and recipe,  https://youtu.be/GVVoTx6dXd8 , (We get a kick out of him with his heaters in HOT-lanta). Our oldest had an old Home-Brew kit kicking around so we stole some materials and mixed up our concoction. Ingredients: 3lbs of honey 1-gallon Distilled Water - Some debate on this too. Seems that water with some minerals left in it adds to the flavor and as long as it isn't heavily chlorinated, tap water is preferred. 1 pkg Lalvin 71B Yeast - After reading some, there's some talk that any old yeast will work... AKA the Fleischmann's® Yeast you get at the supermarket. We mixed our ingredients, and "floated" about a 16% potential alcohol content, so it's off to the closet for a couple of months while the yeast does their thing. Mater...
Read more