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...

Benny's bees swarmed. The good news is he was able to hive them. Then they swarmed again, and he was able to catch another. The texts were flying pretty furiously and here's a record of the back and forth: Monday, Mar 21 · 10:19 AM Benny Smith Good morning Matt and Beth.  I think my hive swarmed yesterday.  I found a swarm in a small tree about 30 ft in front of my hive.  Looked to be all Italians.  I managed to capture it and have it in a 10 frame deep and I got the Queen in a cage rubberbanded on a new foundation in the deep.  When should I release her?  Also, I was going to mark her if now is the time to do it?  This was the swarm. I had to brush them all off onto the ground on a tarp and then find the Queen and cage her and put her in the deep. I closed them up in the deep and moves them to the permanent location this morning, set it up, and gave them some 1:1 SW. These are my 2 hive now.  I set up the new stand and still have the original clo...

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...