Wow it is hard to believe that it is September already. This Summer flew by. I spent a lot of time in the bee yard and a lot of time at home working on projects around the house. This mad the Summer fly by.
In the bee yard I started to focus on building more colonies. This mean a lot of manipulation of the bees and splitting them up to make more queens. One way a queen can be raised is by removing the original queen from a hive and letting the bees become queen less. When this happens the bees begin to feed some of the eggs and larva a diet of a special jelly know as royal jelly. That means that they determine who will be the next queen. It takes a full 16 days for the queen to develop and hatch. Once this is done she flies from the hive to mate with other male bees. So each time you take a chance of the queen flying off and never returning. This year thankfully all,. but one, of my attempts at splitting the hives was successful and each queen returned. The only failure was due to beekeeper incompetence and not the fault of the bees what so ever.
There are also many different ways of raising queens beyond the simple action of splitting a hive physically. There are ways of grafting larva from certain cells and artificially creating bees. I attempted this as well, but without any success. However I was able to create 7 hives from the two hives that I started the season with. So from my perspective I really was successful in my attempts and failures.
The biggest payoff I am hoping is that I will be able to ensure that more of my hives survive the Winter and that I can continue to build them up so that I can produce more honey each year. By simply focusing on the building up the bees I think the rest of my hopes will fall into place. They truly are such an interesting creator and every time that I walk out to work in the bee yard I am nervous and excited to see what will happen next. Hopefully I will get a bit better at posting in the Summer, but I have been finding it hard to sit down to write when the weather is so nice.
It was a good year so far. I pulled about 26 pounds of honey from two of the hives and am hoping to pull at least the same from the hives this Fall. It is quite enjoyable tasting the different flavors of honey. Each harvest I learn something new about how the local flora influences the flavors of the honey. Currently I have two places I keep bees they are only 40 miles apart, but the difference between how the season works is amazing. I wonder how much could possibly change if we moved away from our manicured lawns to building meadows as lawns. I feel like it would change so may things for the animals surrounding us and benefit us all.
Fall is coming on quickly and that means that we will have to start to close up the hives so that the bees can finish getting ready for the Winter. Hopefully I will be pulling the Fall harvest off the hives the last week end in September and finishing any other maintenance before the first snow, till next time.
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