Baby Steps…
This year, like so many others in recent history, we lost a few hives over the winter. With that loss came some changes. We’ve relocated much of our equipment that we had at the Funny Farm back to our home location. We sold a hive to the Funny Farm to help them out a bit, and the money went toward much-needed apiary supplies. Then we ordered 3 nucs from Holt’s Apiary in St. Albans, ME, as theirs are always really good and strong. They came in in early May, and we installed them into the 3 deadout hives we had from last year. So, we had a major setback, but we are still thinking positive! The 3 new nucs, we are hoping, will grow very swiftly, and we can do a couple of splits. With a couple of splits, that will bring us back up to 5 hives, our halfway point. Yes, we are only halfway to where we were before the die-offs from our debut in Maine! But, we will get back to 10. It just may take a little time. We now have new all-natural treatments to knock down the varroa mites. We’ve also got more winter insulation for the hives and will be building a wind block for this coming winter. That should reduce our losses for this coming year. Hopefully, by 2026 or 2027, we will be back to 10 hives. (A little quicker with more sponsors and/or capturing swarms.) One baby step at a time. You can’t force Mother Nature. You can sometimes trick her, but sometimes that doesn’t work out too well. So, Baby Steps…!