It’s hard to tell if the red whelp on my cheek came from the bee stinging me on the nose or from me punching that bee with my fist like it was a grown man.
Tag: bee stings
Building A Better Beetle Trap
I truly hope that someone smarter than me is working on eradicating the Small Hive Beetles. “Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson However, until then, this is my latest attempt. I bought Catchmaster Home Pest Traps (glue traps for insects) 12 pack…
My Cup Runs Over
My bees are flourishing like never before. 20 of the 22 hives at Dr. D’s place are packed with bees and honey. Two needed some help but still had bees in them. I am also happy to say, that I didn’t see a single beetle yesterday – not that I looked too hard for them….
The Mating Sign?
Let me start this blog with a question: What does the “Mating Sign” look like? All 22 hives at Dr. D’s have bees in them. It has been two weeks since I made my last hive splits. There are lot of good reasons why I was too busy to get out to the apiary sooner…
Queen Cells: If at first you don’t succeed.
“In our response lies our growth and our freedom,” Victor Frankl Yesterday’s hive inspections couldn’t have been worse (well anything can get worse but it was bad). The sky was sunny but the temperature was a cool 56F degrees with winds around 20mph. The weekend will been even colder and with lots of rain, so…
First Split of 2018 & Big Bryan’s Beetle Box
“Necessity if the mother of invention.” – PlatoI am an inventor at heart and given my beetle problems last year, I have been trying to build a better mousetrap (beetle trap). Beetle Busters are great but they can get expensive. Fat Bee Man’s political sign traps seem reasonable but I still have beetles when I…
The Magnificent Seven
Hive-B.1.1.VSH “Adopt the pace of nature: her secrete is patients.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson I’m down to (8) hives; one at the old farm and seven at Dr. D’s. However, three of those hives are from recent splits. Given my recent loses, I’ve been obsessing over these remaining hives. The thought wakes me up at…
Miller Method – (8) Cells and (1) Virgin Queen
“You can’t always get what you want but if you try sometimes, well you might find, you get what you need.” – the Stones I miscalculated the birth of the queens. On my queen rearing spreadsheet, queens hatch at (16) days – however, that is from the day the egg is laid. The queen actually hatches just…
More Queens Than A Cher Lookalike Contest – Graft #2
“Agh, that is bad luck. But grandfather say, ‘It never rain everyday.’” – Mr. Kim, The Fifth Element I’ve been quoting that line since 1997 (holy shit – I just realized how old that movie is… even worse… how old I am) – actually I’ve been misquoting it, as the case may be, since I always say, “It can’t rain…
A Good Day to Make Splits
“Five hundred. … five hundred fights, that’s the number I figured when I was a kid. Five hundred street fights and you could consider yourself a legitimate tough guy. You need them for experience. To develop leather skin. So I got started. Of course along the way you stop thinking about being tough and all that. It stops being…
The Harvard of Bee Yards
If “failure is the best teacher” then my bee yard is the Harvard of bee yards. This weekend proved to be heartbreaking. The two Five Frame Nucs I made have both been destroyed by hive beetles. Out of the two nucs, one was filled with lots of bees from Hive-A. It should have been a…
The Good, The Bad, The Splits
“A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.” – Joseph Addison I have another cantankerous hive – though stings don’t bother me as much as they once did. Just the same, Hive-A has become as vile as Hive-D was a few weeks back…
The Return of the Queen – Long Live The Queen!
These days I am much more reluctant to use the word “Miracle” when curiously great things happen. It seems lately every time I do, the next day it turns to crap. That being said, I was amazed to find the queen that had flown away last week had returned. It turns out that it really isn’t…
Hive Location – A tip for the beginner
I cut a 1″ hole in the cheese cloth this morningto let Hive-D.3’s foraging bees slowly enter. I swapped Hive-D with Hive-D.3 yesterday. This segues into today’s topic – Hive Placement. Most books will tell you that the best location to place a hive is in a sunny area, with a windbreak, and an easterly view… and…
No Queens – What to do?
I finished up teaching classes on Saturday and so Sunday I finally had time to check my backyard bees — The two Mini Nucs and Hive-D.3 — sadly not one of the three had a queen. That being said, I suspected the queen was gone from Hive-D.3 as soon as I opened it because when I gave my…
Beetles – My Arch-nemisis
I’m still struggling with the Mating Nuc Concepts. The idea to leave one of the nucs closed up with tape worked out pretty well. Except for the one that I didn’t keep closed absconded. Abscond is a beekeeping term that gets used to say the bees left. However if you look it up in Merriam’s…
I Have No Idea What I’m Doing… But I’m Doing It!
Noah and the (3) MMNs … and poison ivyall over the damn fence!!!!! The new Mini Mating Nucs (MMN) we made the other day aren’t doing well. For starters, they had dysentery as could be seen from the brown streaks on the front of each box. At first I thought it might be Nosema but…
Mini Mating Nucs – First Use
Yesterday, shortly after 5:00pm, Noah arrived and we headed out to Dr. D’s. Hive-D.1 is still full of hive beetles. All the traps were empty. But a frame of wax had (20) or (30) beetle larva that I could see and I killed about (20) additional beetles. This time I cleaned the bottom board and removed the…
The Hive Beetles – I went all Yoko Ono on thier asses
Wax flakes left after the hive beetles chewed through several frames Well I didn’t get back out to Dr. D’s place until Saturday around noon. I’d like to say it was because I worked late but truth was, I was just exhausted by the time I got home from Vicksburg on Friday. Anyway, Saturday was…
Attack of the Small Hive Beetles
Brood Comb destroyed by Small Hive Beetles Wikipedia: “The small hive beetle (Aethina tumida) is a beekeeping pest.”Now there is an understatement. I’ve always had issues with hive beetles. For the most part I have used dryer sheets with a fair bit of success (though I am trying Don the fat bee man’s traps with less success). However, when I…
Honey Homestead 