This morning, the Forsyth CountyBeekeeper association new beekeeper class commented. It was a pretty good turnout. Every year I assist with demo stations. It is the hands on and q&a session for the attendees.  Today was basics of the class, what to expect and the basics of beekeeping.

My demo station is frames and foundation. I discussed everything from how to assemble them to types of foundation. I will post a pic of the class later.

Forgot to mention in the last post that I got 36 gallons in all of honey in 2012!!!!!

It has been a long time since I have posted.... I get busy and forget about the blog. Sorry everyone!

I have lost all of my Strachan Apiary Carnis. They have all either frozen due to small cluster size, absconded or outright died. I only had 1 hive that was awesome and I had the most supers ever on it. They all absconded with food in the hive. I am not impressed with their queens.

I am going to be trying Russians this year. I will hopefully have 4 that are coming from an approved Russian breeder. We will see how they do.

I have had 3 other cut outs since my last post. 2 apartments and one house.

Bee yard report:

I have lost 1/2 of my bees. They have either absconded or starved/froze. I think it is partly due to not being able to do 2 powder sugar shakes in the fall like I try to do. I do not treat with chemicals and the mites probably got bad with no sugar shake.

A vast majority of my honey crystallizes every year and it is hard to sell. Because of this, I am going to use at least half of my honey every year to continue making mead.

busy as a...... :)

I have been busy and I apologize for not posting in a while.

I have 5 apiaries now and 26 hives. I am currently doing 2 trapouts, and starting a 3rd today.

I have done 2 cutouts this season and am also getting ready to do a removal from a water meter tonight.

I have officially run out of empty hives. I have 1 nuc left and 1- 10 frame deep with about 8 frames. Other than that, I have no more hive components.

I have extracted all of the honey for this year and ended up with about 30 gallons! Not bad considering I started with only 8 hives!

one more to add to the list

I got a swarm call again last evening and was not able to get pictures due to the fact it was 8:30 pm by the time I could get there.

There was a ball the size of a basketball. I got it. I looked for any stragglers and right above it was the other half of the swarm.... another basketball size!!!!!! I dumped them in too and headed home.

Another swarm call!

I got another call at 5:30 about a swarm of bees in a bush. They were SUPER gentle. The swarm was about the size of a cantaloupe.

Swarm Call

I got a call at 12:30 today with a woman sawing there were honey bees all over the ground and it looked to be like several thousand. I asked her to describe it and she said honey bees in two blobs on the ground about the size of phone books across the street from the high school and on the sidewalk....

I asked her if she knew the difference between yellow jackets that live in the ground and honey bees and she responded "Yes I know the difference.... I am not an idiot. I am alregic to honey bees and not yellow jackets and these are honey bees!"

I got there and sure enough it was a swarm!

Only one problem.... I found the queen and she was lying on the ground like she was hurt..... I dont know how it happened, but I doubt she will make it. That explains why the swarm was on the ground. I placed a frame of eggs in the box from a hive that has a queen I like.... Maybe I can get them to make a new queen....