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 […]
We left the honey flow scene for a bit and escaped to visit family out in Colorado. It turns out that Andrew is a respectable fledgling kayaker!!! I think the odds are good that he will remember this outing 🙂 I was excited to come back and see how the bees fared in our absence. […]
The clover bloom has held up quite well with the combination of moisture and heat. We’ve steamed our way through heat indexes in the +90F range, so the bees have bounced back from frequent rains much better than if it had been much cooler. It rained in the late afternoon or overnight quite often in […]
We are within several days of the most diverse collection of quality honey flowers that we will see in 2019. The windup has been fairly slow with very moist and relatively cool weather the past three weeks. Trefoil and yellow sweet clover are still near their prime, Dutch clover is strong, and white sweet clover […]
I have to wonder how many people google “nucs” and end up really confused about winding up at a bee blog. . . . A good laugh for the beekeepers of the world 🙂 Right now we have around fifty June nucs maturing. I went through and checked the queens, and they seem to be […]