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...

The bees were grumpy and we did a couple of splits and hopefully can change queens on a few hives. They need some better straight for a better temperament. We made it through 3 of the 4 Hives. We did 25 first as we knew it would be the biggest, and sure enough, she was full of swarm cells. So we found her (no small feat) and got her set aside on the first stand with a couple of frames of brood to get a fresh start. We were able to harvest a couple of frames of cells, so Hive 25 and Hive 15 have them. Hopefully, they are successful, and her genetics will start populating. So, we got 3 of them split and we just did a precursory top box tip-up to check for queen cells. We'll finish them up on Saturday when we have a bit more time. Stand 1 Stand 2 11 13 14 15 21 24 25 Queen from 25 (Originally 23) with a few frames of brood and some shook in nurse bees. Q: Spotted Brood: New 3F's Stores: Light-Feed Temp: A Calm: A Split moving queen to 14. Left in "walk away split fashion...

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...

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...