Just in case you’ve been wondering, the beekids are alright. In fact, they are very happy these days when the sun shines and they can head outside to forage for nectar and pollen. I thought they might like the clover in the yard, but they seem to prefer these poppy blooms far more.

As I stood watching, honeybees alit and disappeared to the bottom of the flower, then slowly worked their way back up. As many as four honeybees worked one flower at a time. If one headed back to the hive, another arrived, as if cued by a choreographer.

We have six active colonies in our little apiary now, and they are all busy. We overwintered one hive and split it in April to make two hives (we added a queen to the second colony). The brood chambers (kind of like a new bee nursery) are three boxes and we’ve added two shallower boxes for honey on top. We hope to get a good harvest from it.

In early April, we bought four “packages” from our bee supplier, Jim Kloek at Nature’s Nectar in Stillwater. They are all doing ok and we’ll probably add more room to each colony for their growing brood soon. We’ll let them keep most of the honey they make so they can get through the upcoming winter.

We check in on the hives every week or two to see how things are going for them. So far, so good.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 7:27 am and is filed under Bees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.