Bee Updates- A 2nd Hive

We've been busy at Redwoodshire, but probably not as busy as the bees.  A few weeks ago, one of our great Pines fell.  Fallen trees are A LOT of work to clean up.  The brother of a friend of ours recently purchased an old lumber mill, and willingly wanted to take that pine off our hands.  While he was here, we decided to take down another pine tree over near the apiary.  The Laird had already been talking about taking that tree down to create more sun for the bee hive during the cold, bitter winter months.  So with 2 trees to clean up, branches and huge chunks of trunk, we were busy.  I told the Laird he was lucky to have me as a wife;)  He asked, "Why?".  "What do you mean "why?"!  I informed him that most 34 week pregnant wives would most definitely not be helping with tree clean up and lugging wagons of brush to the woods.  But the work needed to be done, and it feels good to get a little physical exercise at this point in the game.

About a week after installing our bees, and being reminded just how much we love having them- we decided to bite the bullet and purchase a 2nd package of bees for the new hive we bought over winter.  Initially we had hoped our colony from last year would survive and just swarm into the new hive.  But with our colony loss, that wasn't possible.  And the possibility of catching a swarm was seeming more and more unlikely, as I reached out to a few contacts with no luck.  Rather than have our hive sit empty in the garage (taking up space) and waiting another year for a good honey harvest, we decided to just spend the money on another package of bees.  Our first bees we ordered from an apiary about 3 hours away.  At this stage of Spring, most places are sold out of packaged bees.  But I found a place in Georgia (where most bee packages come from) that still had packages available for shipping.  So we ordered another package, set up our new Top Bar Hive and waited patiently for the bees to arrive to our post office.

Finally, after checking into the post office in Georgia on Monday night of this week, and traveling all week through the postal service with no tracking updates.... our new bees have arrived!  I had expected the bees to arrive yesterday at the latest.  So when there were no tracking updates and they didn't arrive, I started to get concerned- especially with the holiday weekend upon us.  Where in the US were our bees?  I was pleasantly surprised at how few dead bees there were on the bottom of the package, considering they have been traveling since Monday night.  They look amazingly well.  Once we open the package we will be able to inspect the queen and see that she looks good.  We will install this package of bees later this afternoon.

Here's a photo of both hives set up, in the newly cleared space of our apiary.  You can see the tree stump between the hives.  The original hive is the darker- cedar one on the left.  The new hive is made of sugar pine and has a nicer stand- on the right.  The Laird also installed corrugated plastic roofing on both hives, to help prevent water leaking into hive.  We had a small issue with this at the end of winter, and wonder if this contributed to our hive loss.

We plan to name the hives, so we can keep straight which one we are talking about.  Any thoughts?  Now to keep all the weeds surrounding the hives in check- that will be a challenge in itself.  Planning to plant wildflowers around the apiary.... we will see how that works out.  Weeds always seem to win.

The Redwoodshire Apiary

It's been about 2 1/2 weeks since our first bee installation and the bees have been busily building their comb.  We included some bars of brood comb & honey comb we had left from last year's non-surviving bees.   That helped to give them a huge head start.  They currently have 10 bars of comb built up.  It's time to open the hive up and inspect to see if the queen is laying eggs.  That may happen today while we install the other bees, or sometime this weekend.  But the overall picture.... is that they are doing great.  We saved out a few top bars of comb to put in the 2nd hive to give this new package of bees a little head start as well.

Looking forward to taking some photos of the bees inside the hive!