Gee's Bees, LLC

Exactly what we didn’t want, so much for having a plan and sticking to it, but with B’s “good thinking, stinking” award comes the promise of organization in the GBee Yard. So the plan… In order of operations. Hive 21 (Production) Inspect, leave with 6 Frames of brood. (Donating extra).  Find queen remark and clip wing.  Bottom Box: Stores and empty comb, Queen excluder, Top Box: Store and brood. Hive 11 (Production) Inspect.  Find queen remark and clip wing.  Put extra brood from 21 in a second box. Bottom Box: Stores and empty comb, Queen Excluder, Top Box: Store and brood. Hive 25 (Production) Continue to move down into position.  Making queen (4/2). Hive 15 (Production) Move the top box (making queen from 25) to the pallet on its own (4/3).  Combine with Hive 13 choosing the best queen cell between the two.  Set extra brood aside if any, to work as resource hives if nucs not taken. Hive 13 & 23 (Resource/Nucs) Sell, If not, place in 8F boxes. Re...

Saturday's weather was pretty solid, plenty warm enough, 70° and sunny, Greensboro, NC Weather History. Still working towards (4) production hives, moving Hive 23 slowly over to replace Hive 25, which we expect problems from. That will be tomorrow's fun... We've scheduled the Mentees from this year’s Bee School to come over to help and gain some experience and saved inspections from Hive 23, 25 & the Nuc.  We will also start a new ranking system, placing aggressiveness high, and start selecting from queens that behave the way we want and are not so chippy. With a ranking system, we hope we can promote bees that are gentle, calm, have a low tendency to swarm, and are good honey producers.  Benny & Kathy (from the Bee Club) met us this afternoon to take a look at a couple of hives. As suspected Hive 25 (Old 23) was booming and shot up the rankings to Number 1... Description: Super Chill & Super Huge, just what you want. In fact, this Hive was so good, B is conside...

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...