Bee Keeping

[BeeLady]

Well, I know my two hives made it through the winter. For the first time in two years we have lots of wildflowers and I think we just had our last frost yesterday so the mesquite should be blooming soon. Love that mesquite honey!

I didn't feed all winter but instead left the fall honey on my hives. This far south we can usually harvest twice a year, but I didn't want to be feeding all winter so followed my natural beekeeper book and left honey on.

I believe one of my hives is Africanized. It was pretty testy last summer and fall. Its lid blew off and I veiled up to replace it this morning. Only one bee came after me and didn't even bounce off the veil, so far so good. I haven't requeened this hive so I have to assume that it is Africanized.

I've had my bees for five or six years; have had enough honey to make it through each year but not much for friends/family during our two-year drought. Am SOOOOOOO glad we've had a wet spring; hopefully the rain will give us a brief reprieve and not knock the blooms off until the bees are ready for the next phase.

[short cut sally]

Sorry to hear about your bee's Bleeker. I wonder if she reached her prime, wasn't laying anymore, but would think they would;ve managed to requeen themselves. That's an interesting process in itself. BUT you do have a jump on this year though. I figure if I leave my empty hive open, it will be robbed/cleaned and ready for the next colony to get their feet planted, as like you said, I'm hoping a colony will move in so I don't have to fill it myself. My goal, to have 5 hives, including my dad's single hive. My DH gives the approval too, he's gotta extend my fence and lay more filter fabric and get the stones. He has just as much fun telling about my bees as I do. I could work with the space right now, but it would be cramped and not allow any space between the hives, and would reduce my working range.
I talked to a local bee keeper today, he was set up selling his honey and hoeny cream at a local maple festival. I've never had honey cream, and let me tell you, I grew up on maple cream and this was just as delicious as that. I bought several tubs from him. Yeah, it was that good. Anyways, he went into winter with 12 hives, lost only 1. Another customer was there talking, he went into winter with 3 swarms and didn't lose any, which he said was his first time in years at not losing any. He used to have 15 at one time he said but lost them over the winters. They were all happy as there wasn't much honey made this past year due to all the rain.
Bleeker, I did read about your mason bee boxes. In fact, I had never heard of these, so after reading your little blog about them, I researched. Intersting. Here I thought they were some sort of deformed flying ant or something when I saw them. I had no idea. I asked Dad about them, he'd never heard of them either. So I plan on doing up some boxes and putting them around. So thank you for the information! There is so much more to this site than biking, it's all well rounded bunch of useful information!

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Hi Sally,
When my queen died in beginning of December, replacing her wouldn't have worked anyway because there were no drones for the entire winter approaching, and I'm told a virgin queen can't overwinter 5 months and then successfully make it into May and still be able to go on a mating flight. Plus, by that time all the workers would have long since died of old age and the virgin queen could not have replaced them. It was doomed when my queen died. My only hoope during the winter was that there was a second queen in the hive, but apparently not.

I'm SO glad you've become interested in our native solitary bees.
I recently added a few more cool links to sites about them on my blog post:
http://strumelia.blogspot.com/2010/0...most-here.html
Be sure to explore the German site with all its gorgeous photos of creative 'art' bee houses over in Europe.

[short cut sally]

Bleeker, i was making dinner after I wrote that about the hive making a new queen, I thought to myself, "you (meaning me) idiot"...I KNEW there was no way a new queen would get mated in December, the drones are long booted out and on the verge of dying, and where and how is a new queen going to mate? That was silly talk on my end..sorry.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

This morning I got to watch the hatching of two of my solitary blue orchard mason bees from their cocoons. Miraculously I got a couple of good photos of the event:
http://strumelia.blogspot.com/2010/0...-hatching.html

[Zen]

Wow.

I was thinking of you and your bees today. There was a good show on Science Friday today all about bees and beekeeping.
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201004024

[OakLeaf]

Oh, how exciting!