Month: June 2015

Hello bee followers! The Top Bar Hive is doing quite well.  I have moved the divider board over to allow for 25 bars in the hive and opened the second entrance.  There is some honey being stored already and this is still June.  The pictures you see are of the view through the observation window looking up into the comb area.  I have also included a picture of a naturally drawn-out and full brood frame.  This is an amazing season to be a bee-keeper!  You will also see a robber fly taking off with one of the honey bees that was captured while visiting the watering station near the hive.  We are thinking of getting another top bar hive because it is more natural and seems less stressful to the colony than the hive box method.

I just purchased a nuc for my apiary in hopes to have a new queen for the large hive this Fall.  Unfortunately, this queen decided to take off with half of the worker bees and swarmed.  This has left me with a few frames of nurse bees, a few frames of brood, and 7 queen cells!  I hope this time that the queen hatches, mates, and returns to the hive happy and healthy.  I have tried this process a total of 4 times now with this same hive.  The three previous attempts have failed and that is why I purchased the nuc colony with a new queen.  Go figure!  I should know by the end of July if I have a healthy queen in the hive.  If so, then they successfully re-queened their own hive.  Time will tell.

Well, everyone stay healthy this summer and enjoy the beautiful weather we are having.  Bee Happy!

Bee Keeper Tish

 

 

This took some doing, but I was able to hold the frame of bees with the queen on it while I navigated the I phone to shoot the video while trying to keep the queen in the camera frame.  Sheesh.  But, I got a quick shot of the queen in the hive.  You will see her.  She is large, black, and has a fading blue dot on her back.  She moves fast, so pay attention!

Hello!  This is Bee-Keeper Tish.  I have much to share regarding the top-bar hive. The girls are now building on the 14th bar!  There is also honey on the last frame.  I have checker-boarded in partial comb bars into the main part of the hive so that they fill them out.  This seems to be working.  It is getting up to 90’s this weekend so I pulled the bottom boards to allow more ventilation.  I pulled the sugar water feed a few weeks ago since we have so much in bloom with the extra rainfall we have had.  This is unusual for us in May-June.  Often we have had a killing frost in the early weeks of June.  Not this year!  It is over the top hot and jumping into summer weather very quickly.  The extra thunderstorms and rain have been surprising.  I don’t recall a Spring like this in Spokane since I was a kid.  I’ll add some photos of the hive.  This is sure a fun way to keep bees!