Bee Keeping

[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!

[short cut sally]

With the past few days being unusually warm and sunny, I decided to investigate the hives.
I got into my dad's hive first, I had to go back and get the smoker, they were a little on the irritated side to say the least. The top brood/honey storage box, was getting filled with pollen, and liquid gold, it was heavy and also filled with bees. The bottom brood box, was full of active bees. I found the queen. She's still healthy, lots of eggs and larvea filled the comb. They were so active it was amazing. They are really consuming the pollen patty and block of sugar that I put on the top of the hive frames.
I lifted the lid off of my hive, and noticed that they were all active on top. I didn't remove any frames, but I lifted the top box off and in the bottom box, there were empty frames, a few straggling bees here and there but no activity what-so-ever, but the bottom board was full of dead bees (I already cleaned them out once). I thought, not good. I've noticed they only are flying in and out from the top vent hole in the inner cover, and not using the entrance. So, my time frame didn't allow me to pull apart the top box of frames to see what they were doing or should I say, how poorly they might be doing. I was hoping as today was going to be nice and warm again, that I would be able to investigate my hive better, but it's so windy out that I'm not going to take any chances. Only time will tell. And here I thought for sure, they were gonna make it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they hang in there. They are all over the sugar block, but not really using it, but they are using the pollen patty.
Oh well, I keep everyone posted!