UPDATE – 7-26-25
Good Things Coming! Although it’s still a touch-and-go struggle with the bees since the devastating winter of 2021-2022 and some losses that have occurred since, we aren’t giving up on the bees! We can’t give up on the bees! With that said, we are down to three (3) active hives for the 2025 summer season (so far). That is a far cry from the 10 we started with. However, as you know, we’ve relocated everything back to our property to manage them better and more often. The Vassalboro location was great, and Ethan did awesome caring for them all the times I couldn’t get there. But having them here, they are outside our window, and if they start to swarm, we are right on top of it. When it’s inspection time, they are right outside our door! I believe I mentioned in another post that we are also working on 1-Deep Management rather than 2. This will give us a lot more honey and be better for keeping control of the colony’s size. It also makes inspection a lot easier as well as cutting the cost of any natural treatments in half! Saving money is a good thing. Another part of the positive changes is we have purchased a vlogging camcorder (a cheap one) so we can start videotaping hive inspections and goings-on at the apiary. With these films it will help build a presentation to schools so the children can familiarize themselves with the life and times of honeybees. So, once we figure out the camera, you can start expecting some great videos of our hives, inspections, harvests, extraction and bottling of our honey. I hope you will enjoy an up-close and personal view of the bees and their activities. As you can see in the photo on the right, our hives are home but in a new location. We’ve decided not to cut the lawn until late fall on this side so the bees can enjoy the wildflowers and an all-natural-looking area. So far, it seems the bees are doing well in this location. Although we only have 3 active hives right now, our 3rd hive is all made up of deep supers. We can break them down and make splits, maybe this year, and give us 1 to 2 more hives. We have extra frames of honey from last year that we never extracted in case we needed them to feed back to the bees. It turns out, these extra frames of honey will be a considerable help in creating a split and the bees having enough honey to make it through the upcoming winter. So, when we do our inspection this week, I’ll see if any of the hives, especially the one made up of 3 deeps, is ready to split and create one or two more hives this year. If we can get 2 more, that puts us halfway to getting where we were to begin with 3 years ago. You can see (in the picture) that we have extra hives available. (NOTE: This picture was taken from our living room window.)