Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Chickens and First Blooms on Coral Vine
The big and little chickens:
The coral vine beginning to blossom (with pink flowers), which the bees are gonna love. My apologies for the bad photo:
No Comments » - Posted in Grapevines and Nature by Devman
Sunday, July 20th, 2008
Mom Gets a Beesuit
My mom wanted to inspect the bees with us, so she bought a bee suit!
The inspection went well; our Ambrose hive is doing well: They are still very gentle bees; they are bringing in some nectar, though it looks like there won’t be much of a harvest this year (we think it is due to [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Grapevines and Nature by Devman
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
The Augustine Hive Calls It Quits
It was an uphill battle for the poor hive since the beginning when we cut them out of my mother’s wall, and finally, the Augustine hive has all died.
The moral of the story for me and Katie is: Let the hive do whatever they want. If they raise their own queen, let them have that [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Grapevines and Nature by Devman
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
Bee Update
I would have posted this last week but was annoyed by our bees.
The Augustine saga has been:
1. Bee hive cut out of mom’s house and put in our backyard, no queen
2. We give them frame of brood from Ambrose and they raise their own queen (probably a mean one)
3. We buy $30 queen and re-queen [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Grapevines and Nature by Devman
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
Drama Queen
Crazy bees.
Katie was weeding the garden yesterday when she urgently called me to come outside: A queen bee was walking around the wooden frame of the raised garden bed, surrounded by her attendant bees; by the fact that the queen’s wings were clipped, we knew that this queen was one of the new ones we [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Grapevines and Nature by Devman
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
Requeening Ambrose and Augustine
Katie and I ordered two new queen bees from B. Weaver apiaries and had them sent to us via express mail, and they arrived last Thursday!
We searched through the Ambrose hive but could not find the queen, even after 20 minutes of looking, so we decided to introduce the new queen and take the risk [...]