Friday, January 27, 2012

cool happenings

I discovered I have lost yet another hive today. I will be spending my spring making splits and recovering my losses instead of being able to sell nucs.

I will also be officially starting artificial insemination this year. More to come on that in the future.

I have 2 bee hives in a country club and they needed to be moved. The people there love them so they built me an awesome stand/platform for them. I am amazed at how involved the people at the country club are with nature. They wanted them near the gardens, so we decided on the location and I told them about my requirements. And this is what they built for me:




A neighbor where I have some hives took a bunch of pictures and asked a bunch of questions about bees last year. She has entered an art contest with my photo.... Pretty cool! It has some iridescence in it that the camera cant pick up.
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Monday, January 16, 2012

Motivation

All of my bees that are still alive are doing really well even with the recent cold snap. The candy boards and mountain camp method really helped.

The problem is now me. I have a bunch of comb with dead bees in it from my losses and I am starting my rotation out. I will be removing 2 frames from every box, making the bees make new comb and then processing the wax. I am just really lazy about it and have quite a few supers in need of processing.

Does anyone have a good way of processing? The way I have been doing it is: boil everything in excess water. Once cooled but still hot, I take a cheese slicer and remove the underside that has all of the trash. I then use a double boiler system on the good wax. This workd well, but takes a really long time. Any suggestions?

weather at the hive