Gee's Bees, LLC

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...

  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 ...

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.

We were able to mix up some more sugar bricks to put back on the hives that toppled over,  🐝 Storm Damage (geesbeesnc.com) . Ten more pounds of the stuff, just sugar, water, and a splash of Honey Bee Healthy. Next year we may try Kent William's Recipe , pretty much the same with the addition of Citus Acid and Apple Cider Vinegar. Their population look pretty good, so if the queens are still there we should have some viable colonies despite the craziness.

The weather still is weirdly warm, and the bees are busy & loud, In fact, I heard them on them from the screen room this morning ad was able to make out plenty of activity while eating lunch watching from the kitchen window. All this prompted me to take a stroll back there and have a look. They are some busy bees bringing in pollen. I swear they are doing orientation flights... All on January 6th!

We got a pretty warm and sunny afternoon and decided we could poke our heads in Hives 21, 22a, & 22b the ones that received the brunt of the tree falling on them a few days ago,  🐝 Storm Damage (geesbeesnc.com) . They actually looked pretty good, their numbers were higher than what we thought they would be and boy were they angry. The Sting 'O Meter goes to 5 which is no way to start off a New Year. We got the end of the stand propped up on cinder blocks, and all of the hives moved back into position. Hive 21 feels pretty light, so we will get some sugar cakes back on their heads. The weather should be on the warmer side, so we may offer some 2:1 syrup shortly. 

There has been a flurry of posts lately, I guess you can equate that to a flurry of activities. Unfortunately, this one wasn't planned and isn't good. Not a good start to 2022 seems like this is a theme for the last couple of New Year’s. We’ve had a couple of days of crazy weather over the weekend it was 75° with a cold front moving in overnight we had some gusty winds that snapped the top of a tree off, taking out 3 hives. We headed out this morning to get them upright, but the damage may have been already done. The girls still kicking were not happy to see us, and we both were lit up a bit, but we can let that slide… They had a rough night. We’ll have to see if any of them make it. It looks like they've been laying in the rain for a while, so our hopes are not too high. We did beat the snow, a few inches of the stuff, just to add insult to injury. Lesson learned we will be strapping down the hives from now on. Then at least the boxes will stay together if something catast...

You cant have Bottoms with no Tops. I suppose you can but that would be a different  website .  These are pretty straight forward and we had some rails leftover from the Bottom Board Build , so making the cleats was super simple by just opening up the dado a bit to fit the ends of the AdvanTech. We had enough of this leftover to make (4) Lids, and I think we'll buy the other two ( Migratory Top Feeder - Beez Needz ) the AdvanTech is running $85 a sheet now which is still crazy expensive.  We are making progress getting the girls some new Diggs in time for Spring and making the preemptive swarm splits,  The nucleus method - The Apiarist .

Starting the New Year off right, catching up on some half-finished projects namely assembling up (6) 8-Frame, Bottom Boards. The rails have been cut out for about 6-months now, sitting in a pile in the corner of the Bee-Shed collecting dust, so it was high time to get these assembled and ready for the season.  Our design is pretty much shamelessly copied from  Roger's Shop , he had a great video putting these together using cedar fence pickets for the floor and we used furring strips for the rails to help combat the crazy lumber prices of late. We opted for the simple version (without the front face),  Custom Beehive Bottom Boards & Hive Stand - YouTube .  We'll get these dipped after we make some lids and perhaps some Snelgrove Boards . We can also buy some replacement deeps and make it a dipping party as long as we have the  Eco Wood Treatment  mixed up. It felt like it could be the start of the season already. Pushing 75° we actually worked up a bit ...

  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...

Finally, got the sugar bricks ( Recipe ) made, it has been really warm, so we have been concerned about them burning through their stores due to activity. This time of year there's nothing to forage, so they are just wasting energy and food. Unlike us where we seem to be storing around our middles with Thanksgiving and Christmas Cookie Season upon us. More foraging is definitely needed... 😉 The house kind of smells good while this is baking, B doesn't agree. She feels the spearmint in the   Honey B Healthy  is nauseating and counters with  Yankee Candles . So now we have competing smells of Wrigley's Chewing Gum and Winter Stargazing Candle Scent that are pretty off-putting. Later in the afternoon, temperatures reached close to 70℉ on December 4th! We donned our bee coats and put the shims and bricks on the hives, the hives look really good. Especially Hive 15... Whoa there's a lot of bees. They actually got (2) bricks. In their immediate future will be an...

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...

Have you ever been handed a frame of bees to hold while your spouse tries to catch a new queen for marking on it? Me neither at least until today. Being a model of coordination & steadiness I grabbed a hold of the side rails and most bees made way, one did not. Typical fury of a scorned woman, that one bee gave up her life to show me her displeasure in being manhandled. Atypical of me I had to take this assault on my left pointer finger in a stoic fashion so as not to be the target of the wraith of the real woman of the apiary, diligently trying to put a white dot on the thorax of a 2021 matriarch.  Being a beekeeper the number one question you get asked always involves stings. How many? How often? Where? and my personal favorite "Have you ever?". Non-beekeepers really don't appreciate the true amount of stings we get. I will say the more experience you gain the sting count does go down, but it's still a fairly regular occurrence. On a beautiful sunny afternoon on...

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...

It turned cold again... grrrr! Hopefully, those bees have enough population in the box to cover the brood. Starting (as always) to second guess myself with moving that brood above the excluder to make more room for that queen to lay. The last thing we want are frames of chilled brood right before the flow. While we are taking the time to worry a bit, I also hope these frosty temps don't burn the new flowers.  I spent some time working on an updated version of the entrances to the new mating nucs I have rattling around inside my head. Shamelessly taking the Guardian Bee Hive Entrance thoughts and adding some robbing screen details. Hopefully combing both protection against Small Hive Beetles and Robbing.  The design of the entrance plate so far: ... and the frame to mount it on the hive: I haven't got the frame actually printed yet to test the form, fit, and function yet. Hopefully today. Well, it came out pretty cool. Made the entrance plate proud by 1/8", but other th...

It's a tease, I know that. Soon the polar vortex will swoop down and give us the coldest temperatures of the winter. I think this will be it, Old Man Winter's last hurrah, but also know better than to get too cocky. More schizophrenic than that crazy Aunt with all the cats, we are going to go from 61° and sunny to 35° with snow and rain this weekend. It looks like we are not going to get the once forecasted low of 12° that was predicted not so long ago. Now it looks like we will bottom out in the twenties for a couple of nights. Nothing these bees can't handle. It was nice enough to take a peak. We wanted to make sure the gals had enough sugar brick left to hole up for the next couple of weeks, and I'll do my best to leave them bee. We even took the opportunity to dig into one of the stronger hives. They had eaten a good portion of their sugar brick, so we could manipulate frames without making too much of a mess. We found the queen navigating a frame of brood. She had ...

I'm usually not one to shy away from work. Who am I kidding, the older and fatter I get the more a beer and my recliner look enticing. I've also noticed my internet time has also been sharply curved from porn and sports to bee research and two-finger typing on this silly site. Some would argue that this is a good thing, but I'm still not sure. Regardless, it keeps me out of the bars during the day at least. The nucs have a fresh coat of primer on them and soon will be painted a cheery yellow and a light blue that looks like white no matter how much QB says I have to look at it in the right light. To further my way down the slope of checking my man card at the door, I described yellow as cheery. Demasculation aside, I hate painting (he said in a whiny voice) and those little freeloaders better appreciate their new houses and reward us with a boatload of honey!

After a couple of hours cutting up some old 1/2" plywood we had kicking around the shed Beth put one together. Gotta say it came out good enough for the bugs we hang out with... at least functional. We followed the cut-list from beesource.com  - https://goo.gl/EC2CTH . A few modifications, like having the entrance run the entire width of the box to accept a modified reducer, and I want to run the Hive Cleats all the way around the top to have more land if we want to use a top feeder in the future. Calling this a success, they just need a couple coats of paint and these should work for a few years at least. We do want to put some thought into a hive top feeder to fit. Getting closer to being ready for the Summer Solstice (it's cooler to say that than the beginning of July) to practice some OTS Starts after the flow.