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I’m looking at the Flow Hive frames to see if they are ready for harvest.

Checking the flow hive and seeing if it is ready for harvest.

The honey is beautiful as it flows out and the bees coming and going are not disturbed.

I now need snowshoes to get to the hives as we have much more snow this winter than last.  I’m grateful for the snow as it adds needed insulation for the queens and colonies to stay warm and healthy.  The worker bees must maintain the cluster temperature around the queen at about 80 degrees inside the hive.  Here are some recent photo’s of the hives.  You can hear the bees inside if you put your ear up next to the hive body.

The top bar has a 2 inch closed-cell foam board on the top under the roof. We put plastic on the sides to block the wind and a candy wafer inside for extra food. The wind hit last week and knocked the hive off the footings. If we hadn’t put the tie-down straps on the hives they both would have been kites or torn apart by the 60+ mile-an-hour winds.

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!

 

 

 

 

I filled the feeders of the 2 year old hives that made it miraculously through the winter, but this past week discovered that the smaller hive is re-queening.  I’m not sure what happened as I had seen the queen the week before.  She wasn’t laying many eggs though and the hive was failing.  I’m glad she got the hive through the winter but she didn’t come out strong this Spring.  I was ready to replace here, but it looks like her daughters took care of the problem before I had a chance.  They are pretty smart girls.

 

It is a cold, windy, rainy day so I didn’t spend much time in the hives today.  You can see the tie-down strap over the top bar to keep the wind from taking it away like a kite.  There is a currant bush (near as I can identify) behind the hive which is nearly blooming.  I have had difficulty identifying this wild tree because it is very old and tattered.  It is either a variant of an elderberry, or a currant.  The bees love it as well as the giant snowberry bushes nearby.  All the better for the amazing tasting honey!

Two weeks after package installation the bees are making comb onto the 6th frame already!  The queen is very productive and the hive is thriving.

 

This is the 4th frame which is naturally drawn out comb and packed with bees.