June is almost always a time of great hope for an impressive honey flow in Iowa. As the image above shows, we’ve been running around getting boxes on everything in hopes of catching some early surplus honey. Andrew has enjoyed climbing around the trucks and making “steps” of the boxes so that he can get […]
One of the virus-related disruptions of 2020 is that I no longer sit at a coffee shop on Sunday mornings and write a blog every week or two. Apologies for the lengthy delay in writing an update since the California venture early in the year! The bees did quite well in the exceptionally warm and […]
Almond bloom is exploding into a beautiful scene for bees and beekeepers. When we pulled into this orchard several days ago, there were no open blooms. As the image above shows, large portions of this orchard are now fully open and enticing millions of bees to visit. Forager after forager is coming home loaded with […]
Almond pollination is officially underway in the orchards where our bees are located. In the image above, I count six pollen carriers, though one of them is disappearing into the entrance rather than standing around with the others. The orchard with the load from Pella is in substantial bloom, especially in the younger half of […]
This week we had a request on social media to offer more detail about how we are working to prepare for almond pollination season. The trees won’t open for a few more weeks, but we go through a lot of work and investment to get them shipshape before the big event. Right now I’m sitting […]
A few days ago we started our California bee rounds among the almond trees. We are in two different orchards instead of one this year. The Pella load of bees all went to a ranch where we found them staged on the ends of the rows. We got through that entire group in less than […]
The American Honey Producers Association is holding its annual convention in Sacramento. Founder Phil started coming to this conference roughly fifteen years ago; we think it was 2004. In more recent years, Alex and I joined the annual bee people party. This year’s conference was the first time that all three of us have been […]
Our beeswax business has turned out to be more substantial than we planned or even imagined. We’re still smalltimers compared to the giants of the industry, but we do enjoy handling many thousands of pounds of pure beeswax. A lot of folks probably don’t have experience with nature’s wax. There are a ton of paraffin/petroleoum […]
Our last truckload of bees indeed made it to California safely. I was most worried about the snow I mentioned in the last post potentially closing I-80 up in the mountains, but the 30″ I feared turned into less than three inches in the end. The forecast at that elevation changes drastically from day to […]
Yesterday we sent out the last truckload of hives for this year. They embarked on their trip to California several days later than anticipated due to more excitement with the weather and a small mechanical issue on the truck we hired. Hopefully those challenges don’t resurface on the way out to northern Cal. We were […]