Beekeeping and Bees

First honey of the season. The second established hive will probably give about 10 times as much.

This hive died, the queen didn't make it and they were not able to rear a new one quickly enough. When I checked it today, it was totally dead, so I harvested the honey in the super and closed up the brood chamber with some apivar.

In the fall I will get this one going again. My other hive is doing amazing.

Mite counts were low on both hives, and I do preventative treatments.

@beekeeping A family friend is a local farmer and he mentioned that his beekeeper has retired and wanted to know if I would be interested. I don't have enough hives to jump right in next year - I would need to capture a couple swarms and then probably make a couple of splits from my own apiary to have enough (he farms ~20 acres). This wouldn't be migratory work - more just managing colonies on his property.

Anyone doing this? What kinds of expectations are realistic starting from scratch?

Any guesses on the species?

@beekeeping When is the latest you would consider a walk away split (no queen to introduce) in the season?

I'm Zone 6A and I have a single brood chamber colony filling honey boxes (one with wax being built) and still keeping stores below on what would otherwise be brood nest. They're not bound, but it's definitely not as organized as I'd like.

I prefer single brood, but if it's too late, I can throw another deep with waxed frames on top to let the queen really go for it.

cross-posted from: https://no.lastname.nz/post/33050

There are no native honey bees in New Zealand, so there are lots of bird pollinated plants here. The bees quickly work out that they can get the nectar from the flowers by working the base of the flower

Might sound dumb but we have some two spot bumblebees that are ALWAYS on our anise hyssops and thought if I could tell if there are repeat customers, I could give them names lol

Started my first hive this year. Trying to turn the lawn into a meadow and have had a surprising amount of volunteer wildflowers. Grass is hip high now, should I cut it back? Planning to scatter seeds this fall.

A good budding discussion over at Native plants.

Any beekeepers want to chime in?

Sounds like a good deal to me.

Started with a bundle from Crown Bees, and have really enjoyed watching them return to their tunnels with pollen and bits of leaves. That single house inspired me to convert a 300 square foot section of my lawn to locally-native flowering plants. I have a feeling this is a rolling conversion, and my property will look very different over the next few years.

Couldn’t be happier.

Interesting article, but it mentions letting your brood box become honey bound as a way to pause brood to lessen the mite load. I found that an interesting concept since I do that anyway.

It's not just about honeybees, with this database you can see all the types of bees that typically pollinate a particular plant or crop

This dataset comprises all bee interactions indexed by Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI; Poelen et al. 2014). It is published quarterly by the Big Bee Project (Seltmann et al. 2021) to summarize all available knowledge about bee interactions from natural history collection, and community science observations (i.e., iNaturalist), and the literature. Interactions include flower visitation, parasitic interactions (mite, viral), lecty, and many others.

A quick minute video I made of a Bumblebee on some Japanese Meadowsweet

I do seven supers at a time (the capacity of my deep freezer) so I won't finish for a few weeks.

It's a great shot

The Honey Pavillion at the Royal Highland Show in Edinburgh. I worked here all day, moving from meet n greet to candle-making, education, honey tasting and finally, observation hive. A proper little worker bee! It was brilliant, if exhausting. Tomorrow I start on candle making duties, my favourite.

Needless to say, this is not me in the photo! 😁

Hi, just want to share our first beehives. I have no experience in beekeeping but i hope for the best! Made 4 beehives during wintertime myself and got two swarms few weeks ago from a friend. So far so good. Today we expect some heavy storms so i think about securing the hives with some straps. What do you think?

Recorded some of Sunday's inspections