This is a journal I will be keeping to document my experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in beekeeping. This will be my first year, 2011, keeping bees. We'll see how it goes. I will be keeping bees naturally, letting them build on foundationless frames, and without medication. This is also my first blog I have ever done and I am by no means a journalist or English major. So, if you see grammatical errors of any and all kinds don't be surprised. The looks of things on the blog will probably change several times before I come up with something that I like.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Its been a long time.

Well it has been a very long time since I posted on the blog.  It has been a very busy summer for me as well.  I watched my wife graduate too.  She is now an RN and loving it.  I am very proud of her.

But anyway back to beekeeping.  I last left off just after I had established my second colony.  I still have both hives and both seem to be doing ok.  However, this has not been a good year for me honey wise.  I wasn't able to get any surplus honey off either hive.  As Dean Stiglitz stated in his book, "Don't risk long term success for short term gains."  Only my bee tree hive had actually stored honey, as of a couple weeks ago they only had about 3-4 frames of capped honey.  So now I am feeding sugar syrup heavily.  I had hoped not to do this but if am to keep either of the two hives through winter it looks like I will have to. 

Looking back, I should have feed both of the hives a lot more when I started them.  Since they both were foundationless they needed the sugar syrup in order to make the comb.  I could have helped out more, and should have, looking back over the year.  This was my first year and I have made some mistakes but have learned from them as well.  Hopefully things will go a little smoother next year. 

My package hive has started to kick out her drones.  Which I thought was a little late in the year to be doing, but they teach me different each time I get in the hive. 

Till next time, thanks for reading
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4 comments:

  1. The Starved IdiotNovember 1, 2011 at 3:23 PM

    thanks for the update! looking forward to seeing how the cooler months go for you and your girls. kudos to your wife - huge accomplishment.

    ReplyDelete
  2. MichelleDecember 25, 2011 at 5:33 PM

    Congrats to your wife on obtaining her RN license!

    I had the same experience with my hive. They didn't make any surplus. We added a 2nd hive in spring 2011 so they were busy building up but we thought for sure that our 2010 hive would give us honey. I think the swarming made it impossible to get honey :(

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousDecember 28, 2011 at 11:08 AM

    Hi there! How did your top bar swarm traps work out? I'm considering the same. :)

    Thanks a million!

    ReplyDelete
  4. JamesDecember 28, 2011 at 11:14 AM

    Thanks you all.
    Abbey,
    I didn't catch any swarms in any of the traps I have made this spring or summer. Oh well. I plan on setting out more traps this coming year as well, so we'll see how it goes then.

    Thanks for the comments.

    ReplyDelete

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