The bees are still shaping up well for fall 2019. It looks like primary caretaking should be finished in roughly one week, and then there will be a little cleanup duty followed by the great bee roundup. Feed and mite control continue to be the main points of focus. Fortunately the bees are putting on […]
This week we spent a couple of days organizing our indoor bee life. The intro image shows the process of packing away the honey boxes now that the temperature has fallen enough to deter wax moths. It feels strange to be paying attention to buttoning up for winter after so many months concentrated on squeezing […]
Fall feeding requirements have been inconsistent from yard to yard. We have a good number of hives down in Muscatine county and a similar number near Kalona. It’s a roughly forty minute drive between them. They were all two-deep doubles through the honey season. The inspection schedule between all of these locations for harvest, mite […]
The image above is the last yard we harvested in 2019, and we always give a mite treatment on the day of harvest. It’s a time when the hives are already open, and it’s essential to get the sequence underway as quickly as possible in late summer. These particular hives were all singles that weren’t […]
We had another “first” during the honey harvest this year! We encountered several tree frogs hanging out with some hives on a timberline in Linn County. I found the one in the preceding picture crawling around inside the hive! I suspect they were snagging a few bees for food, but I couldn’t help but think […]
The weather has been extremely kind for the past few weeks as we continue with the honey harvest and mite treatments. The beautiful box of honey at the top of this post was discovered yesterday and put me in an extra good mood! I have around 100 bonus hives that were started very late from […]
Yesterday we went on a mite treatment blitz to make the most of a Saturday afternoon. At the last location, we spotted a gigantic five-pound cluster nestled between a lid and a hive. That’s what you see in the image above. Sure enough, we gently pulled back the lid and discovered white worker comb that […]
It’s great to see the honey barrels counting up as harvest continues. Now is also the time to pick up the pace or suffer the consequences. Most of the months April-November feature some type of urgency to keep on top of the bees, but the beginning of September has always felt like the time when […]
We are now focused on getting the 2019 crop into barrels and the bees treated for parasites. I never get tired of bringing home the first loads, priming the system, and getting the first few barrels full. Since the crop looks better than average this year, we have a busy several weeks ahead of us. […]
The main honey harvest month is upon us. Until several years ago, we waited until later in August to start stripping the hives of all their surplus boxes. We sometimes even got a strong late summer flow that filled 1-3 boxes after the first pull. Now we don’t even try for a late flow in […]