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Man has it been busy here! It seems everybody in the world wants a beehive. Working like a galley slave building hives and getting the girls ready to divide into new colonies. And now, on about the first day of Spring, 4 inches of snow! Oy, what weather is this?? But the GOOD news is, out of my 40 hives, not a single one died out! In fact, they all look really good, even the one that went queenless in late Fall--it is full of bees. I gave it some eggs/larvae, go for it girls!
I believe the incredible survival rate is due to by choosing for survival by stocking with swarms in the first place--swarms that had come from untreated feral stock. More on this later, I gotta run, bzzzzzz
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Well here it goes again, I hope this time I am not hacked and deluged with porn links like last time. It has been a relatively tough year so far for the bees, a lot of cold and snow. So far, I think they are all doing pretty well, at least the 33 hives in my home yard. A couple need feeding. I do not believe in early stimulation by feeding liquid feeds like sugar syrup, but I have given the light hives a bag of sugar opened on the top, with a cup of hot water added, thus creating a thick slurry. I have to add water periodically but it seems to work well this way.
We had a few warm days earlier, around the end of January, and I set out a tray of soybean meal (as pollen substitute). The bees went wild over it, there was a regular cloud of them. They looked pretty white with all that pollen on their bodies. I'll try to post a pic later in the photos page.
People are putting in orders for beehives so fast that I think I will be booked up solid in a couple weeks. It is so amazing, this interest in beekeeping has just exploded in the last two years. Very gratifying! For thirty years the general public regards you as extremely strange, keeping insects for a living. Then overnight, it is "so cool". Life is so unpredictable.
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