The Outdoor Season, Well and Truly Begun

Spring                                                    Bee Hiving Moon Kate got a nasty cellulitis on her left arm.  Probably from scratches incurred while vigorously pruning and weeding.  Spring clean up.  It swelled up, got hot […]

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Bee Diary 2012: Hiving the Packages.

Spring                                                       Bee Hiving Moon “Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you’ve been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want […]

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Bee Diary: Hive Inspections

Beltane                                                    Waxing Garlic Moon Colony #1:  This is the colony in which my queen release went well.  She’s been busy.  The second hive box, on only a week, has all the brood frames with brood, some full, some partial, so I went ahead and added another hive box.  This is the colony I’m going to […]

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Bee Diary: Keep On Keepin’ On

Spring                                                           Full Bee Hiving Moon The die is cast again for this season.  Three packages, three three pound packages with around 8,000 bees each will arrive on Saturday.  I’m glad Kate convinced me to buy the larger package since the shipments experienced a two-week delay due to bad weather in California.  Gotta dig out the […]

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Bee Diary: June 24, 2010

Summer                              Waxing Strawberry Moon I got through 2.5 hive inspections.  The package colony has beautiful comb, an excellent egg-laying pattern and is now ready for the third hive box.  That’s as far as it needs to go as soon as it fills out at least 8 frames in the new hive box.  That should happen […]

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Bee Diary: June 7, 2010

Beltane                                           Waning Planting Moon Hive inspections today.  Looking to see how the bees are using the other two honey supers I put on last week, now a total of four.  They have two almost full, but they have not begun to draw out much comb on the two with bare foundation.  At least not yet.  […]

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More Bee Stuff

Spring                                           Waxing Awakening Moon The bulk of the bee woodenware has come:  frames for honey supers, honey supers, foundations for honey supers, a bee brush, a feeder for syrup and a bunch of pollen patties and goop to make my own if I need to do so.   While this may seem like a lot of […]

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Late June Hive Inspection

Summer                        Waxing Summer Moon Mark and Elise came over today.  We wandered through the garden and the orchard, followed by Rigel and Vega.  They licked and pressed and jumped.  New people!  New people!  Oh, boy!  Oh, boy!  New people!  Rigel and Vega found Leif and Tate and Tate’s twin really, really interesting.  Baby head!  Baby […]

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Queen Bees

Beltane                  Waxing Dyan Moon Hat jauntily askew and ready to check on his bees. The bees have been busy since I left two + weeks ago.  A lot more worker bees, probably three times than the original packagae, so maybe 24,000 bees.  Also a lot of queen cells so I think they are not far […]

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