working hard, bringing in lots of beautiful, golden pollen~
a little ways to go with the fence, but I'm nearly there. and then I can make that xylophone!
a bit of capped honey~
and quite a lot of capped brood! if you look closely, you can see the larvae in the cells that aren't yet capped~ you can also see some uncapped honey around the brood cells.
the bigger, 'puffier' cells on the left in the photo below is drone (male) brood, and on the right is the worker (female) brood~ after a little while longer, as their numbers increase a bit more, we will try to split the hive and hopefully get back to two hives. we'll take some of the capped brood and honey from this main hive and place them in another hive box, let them rear their own queen, and hope for the best!
the colors of some of this pollen they are bringing in is so vivid and brilliant~ ranging from butter yellow to neon orange, and everywhere in between.
it is so encouraging and wonderful to see such signs of a healthy and thriving hive after two years of touch-and-go beekeeping. this is going to be a good year, fingers crossed! hopefully our first year extracting honey!
good luck with the bees and your honey harvest! and looking forward to your xylophone :)
ReplyDeletethank you! and yes, me too- I just need to get back into the tying-together-lots-of-bamboo mood ;)
DeleteOH, I love bees and bamboo! What a pretty fence thingee.
ReplyDeletethanks!
Deletewow. wow. wow.
ReplyDeleteI so want to do this but I don't have the time quite yet.
I would love more posts on beekeeping from you. What do beginners need to do/know to get started? (Just some basic points.)
Your hive looks amazing! Is it close to your house? In a neighborhood? That's one thing my husband is worried about. We live in an urban neighborhood.
We see SO many dead bees on the streets here. I think part of what is killing them are the new "smartboxes" which are meters that the electric company wants everyone to use. They mess with the bees sensory input and they can't make their way back to the hive. (We opted out of the smart box - for a price- and kept the "analog" box.)
Anyway, I"m madly in love with bees. I really want a hive someday.
well, honestly, I still consider myself a beginner beekeeper, but of course I realize that there have been valuable lessons learned these last three years. lessons that would be helpful for others interested in getting into it to hear. hopefully we can split the hive soon, and when we do I will write a more detailed post about that and about what else we've learned along the way. feel free to email me if you have any specific questions!
Deleteit IS close to home. it is right in our back yard, along the back edge of the yard. yes, in a neighborhood. there are two neighbors right on the other side of our back fence. we let them know about our plans to get bees before we did, to be neighborly and such, but really the bees just do their thing and bother no one. they like one of our neighbor's bird baths, but other than that, they keep a low profile. we sit right next to the hive to watch them. Claire knows not to run around in front of the hive, but aside from the little bamboo fence, there's nothing else between them and the yard/garden.
interesting about the smart boxes. hmmmm.