Bee utiful Weather

Ok, I know it's been awhile. But I've been insanely busy. I quit my regular job last week and the bee work has taken up every single minute that I have left. I don't know how I thought I could possibly get ready to add 20 hives and work two jobs. Jiminy Cricket . . .

I don't even know where to start at this point. On Saturday April 15, 2006 we took the five hives I had left (I ended up loosing hive number 1) and dividing them so my five became 10. I thought I really had it together until we started seeing how many bees were in both brood boxes for each hive. I couldn't find the queen. I just couldn't find her and I got so frustrated with the whole situation, that we ended up taking the hive apart. There were 7 and 8 frames of brood in each hive. I don't know what I did right; I still don't have a clue. Anyway we took 3 or 4 frames of brood and divided what was left of the honey between the two and then put a box of empty frames on top of the two hives and then put feeders on both of them. I initially went in and was going to rotate the boxes from the bottom to the top but honestly my boxes were full of bees.

I did take a break in the middle of it all and made an emergency phone call to Uncle Ted and he told me that if I couldn't find the queen and there was that much brood in the boxes to divide them and check the hive in three days. I'll look to see if there is a supersedure cell growing and if that's the case I'll mark the hive as not having a queen. I probably will end up getting queens when I pick up the twenty hives on Saturday. My 25 hives have now grown to be 30.

What that means is that I ended up going to the local bee supply store and picking up 5 more telescoping covers, 5 more feeders and five more queen excluders. I already have enough brood boxes and bottoms. But my bill ended up being over 200.00 once again.

To get back to the weekend, well we spent from morning till night painting and building the rest of the woodenware that I needed to have in the field. I'm telling you, I'm exhausted. Jim just looked at me and said, "Thank goodness, I had a couple of days off." (I don't think that me meant that in a really nice way)





So this morning I went to the supply house and when I got home I painted the covers so that I could take them out to the field. Oh and I built the new "Bee-mobile," (also known as a garden wagon to the unimaginative.)
Here is a picture of the little beauty: