Tucked away for winter… or are they?
I went to check in on the bees today, wondering how they’ve been doing in this early cold snap we’ve had. Here’s what they looked like when we arrived…. pretty quiet. I’m not sure if it was me, or my barking companion Nanook the…
Prepping bees for winter
The bees made it through the fall (yay!) and so we are getting them set for their first winter. It’s a tricky business trying to help bees survive through our long, cold Ontario winters. Roughly 25% of colonies in Ontario won’t make it through…
Fall Honey Harvest
Late Swarm Risk About a week after our last check in, we went back to the hives, and the Barracks hive had 7 queen cells along bottom edges of frames. Yikes. A beekeeper friend told us we likely had between 24-48 hours before the…
Day 35/36 Inspections
They have started putting honey in the flow hives! It seems that our ladies – (both sets!) – have finally figured out how the flow hive frames work, and they have put the wax comb in along the edges where it needs to be….
Day 30/31: Hive INSPECTIONS
Thirty days in and there is good and not-so-good news… Boathouse The Boathouse bees have filled the medium we put on there and it really amazed us how quickly they did that. So that’s the good news. We figure there is between 35 and…
Day 20 – beeHIVE check in
ONE BROOD BOX OR TWO? We decided to go with one deep brood box with one medium brood box for both of our hives. 10 days into that decision, it seems like it’s working really well for the Boathouse hive. They have almost filled…
10 days in…
As a new beekeeper, I have about a million questions about what to expect with our new hives. We are now 10 days in, and there has been so much to learn already. So far, so good… I think. We got very lucky and…
5 days in…
Checked in on the bees today. Absolutely amazed at how much they have accomplished in just 5 days. Feeling like quite the underachiever in comparison. Boathouse Hive In each of the hives, they have started building out the comb on 4 frames already. That’s…
Boathouse & Barracks
On June 25th, we picked up 2 nucs from Ron at Capital Bees. Why Ron? He’s part of the Ontario Resistant Honey Bee Selection Program – a program to try to actively breed bees to be resistant to pests and diseases, gentle to work…
Many mosquitoes….
Derek and his dad made this bear fence and bee stand over the weekend, and though the picture looks sunny, they were building on a rainy day in a heavily mosquito infested area. ‘The Boathouse’ (on the left) and ‘The Barracks’ (on the right)…
