Gee's Bees, LLC

We headed over to Summerfield to drop off Rachel's bees. Met her husband Richard nice guy, but not sure how into bees he is. That's okay, she has enough enthusiasm for both of them. After some minor fiddling with the cement, block hive stand they were officially placed in their new home. She should be in good shape and has already mixed some syrup to feed them. B should go over there and walk her through her first inspection, but I'm not sure how involved she wants to get with other people's bees, (OPB). Later that afternoon we headed over to Sheetz in Union Cross to drop off a couple of pounds of honey to Ashley. She reached out to us via Gee's Bees | Facebook , we didn't know her so I tagged along for the drop. Turns out she was looking for some local honey and someone recommended us via a FB Mom's Group. Word of mouth is spreading... I guess this is pretty neat. Busy day... We also made a date with Dan to pick up some equipment from him and Josh. We say i...

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. 

We are big fans of the OTS  (mdasplitter.com)  method of rearing queens and splitting a hive. We typically do it in the Spring to help keep swarming down and in Mid-Summer to help knock the mites back and produce fresh queens for next year's Spring build-up. The reason we like it so much is its ease, lack of specialized equipment, and it doesn't require a ton of bee resources. We are a small operation with goals of maintaining six hives: 4 for honey production and 2 support hives for unforeseen, but inevitable situations. So grafting a slew of cells, starter/finisher hives, and mating nucs are not appealing. Plus the lack of fine motor skills put a serious kabash on transferring larvae to a cup. The head beekeeper is not feeling it either, she wants to make honey not bees, so the process just works well for us. We wrote up an OTS Schedule and a process that's in a Google Doc (Gee's Bees OTS Procedure) , but some highlights: Ease It doesn't get much easier than remo...

We bottled up another bucket last might. Fresh out of the warmer - ( 🌡️ Warming Honey) , so it ran pretty quick and clear, Totals were: (36) Plastic 1lb Squeeze Bottles, and about 16lbs for personal use. B put the word out on   Gee's Bees | Facebook . We've already sold a couple. That's good, cause we still need to get rid of a couple of hundred pounds yet.

  Background: Bottling cold or even worse crystalizing honey is not much fun. Messy and time-consuming bottles that come out cloudy make the head beekeeper a little angry, and angry gals are never a good thing when dealing with bees. Our solution was to purchase a bottling tank. We had our eye on a Maxant Tank (MODEL 600-2 200# or 16 gallons) for a while now and decided to bite the $1,350 bullet plus another $100 for the No-Drip Valve. This is a fine piece of equipment that will last us a lifetime, and solve our crystallizing honey problem by being able to bottle on demand.  The trouble is these are very difficult to come by these days. We tried a couple of dealers hoping that Rossmann Apiaries would help cut back on shipping costs without any luck. We even called up to Maxant and they are having all kinds of supply chain issues. The bottom line is they can’t get the components needed to build the tanks and are sporting a 3 month lead time., (Thanks COVID). By no means a kno...