This was our first year of bee keeping and needless to say we have a lot to learn. We started with some second hand equipment that was on the property my brother just purchased. It was a bit of cleaning up of about four or five hives that were set up. I pulled them apart and started to clean frames out. Which in hind sight I probably could have left alone and just reused them with the new colonies that I ended up purchasing, but this is a complete learning experience.
I had to throw out about twenty percent of what was there since the hive bodies or frames were rotted or just didn't seem like something that was going to be usable. At the end of it I had about four 10 frame boxes, about fifteen frames, and four queen excluders. So I bought a few new frames and took one of the bad boxes and built a swarm trap. Thinking I might be able to catch something at my parents house.
We got a bit of a late start but I managed to purchase two colonies. One colony I purchased from a local bee keeping supply company, the other I purchased from a migratory bee keeper in our area. It was a bit nerve racking the first time I was driving a nucleus colony from the pick up back to the apiary in my little SUV. All I kept thinking about was getting in some kind of accident and getting stung in the process.
Needless to say I was able to get both of the colonies to the apiary and both of them placed in their hives. From there all the real learning started. I knew it was going to be some work and that I would have a few bumps in the road, but I wasn't completely aware of what I needed to do. One of the places I learned a lot was on Youtube, there are a ton of people who have published content. There are a quite a few videos on getting started bee keeping and a definitely a few different approaches to how to do things. Since we are in Upstate New York I had trouble finding people that have similar climates. The University of Guelph however is pretty close and has quite a few great videos on bee keeping. I watched almost every video and then every suggested video from there. Since we are also close to Cornell I quickly found Dr. Thomas Seeley videos. Then it was on to Michael Palmer from Vermont and his videos and talks. Last I found Sam Comfort and his videos and talks. I really learned a lot from each of them. Each also has a slightly different view about bee keeping.
So I had my two hives and I was checking for brood and seeing all the normal things that I thought I should. I was trying to fight off ants since each time I opened the hive I seemed to see them prior the the bees. I was not going to loose the colonies to ants, so I set up water traps at the bottom of my hive stands and keep plugging away and doing weekly checks. Then of course things started to bloom, and I didn't realize it. My colonies quickly grew and I thought I was doing everything right by keeping my queen excluder on the hives and trying to remove queen cells. Needless to say for me as a first year bee keeper this might not have been the best strategy. I wish I had simply keep off the queen excluder and simply kept adding boxes, but I didn't. Both of my hives swarmed and I didn't realize it until I saw my numbers decrease. So I pulled off the queen excluder from both of my hives and started to add frames.
I kept checking for brood eggs and tried each time I went into the hive to find the queen. Then I realized that one of my hives was rebounding but the other wasn't. At that point I was sure I had lost the queen I likely had pinched all the viable queen cells and they didn't have a way to recover from that. So I purchased a queen and installed her in early August, hoping I didn't doom the colony as things were slowing down for the season. By the end of August I had two hives with two 10 frame boxes that had bees, honey, and pollen. So I grabbed the few extra frames off one of them and did a simple crush and strain getting eight 8 ounce jars of honey. It was exciting and as we headed into the Fall I figured next year I will at least have a few different ways of approaching this. Hoping to increase my numbers and maybe get a few more jars of honey.
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