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Nyack Community Garden and Bees

February 28th, 2014

Nyack has a community garden that I see every day while coming home on the bus. I saw the notice about participating today. I have often wondered if they need bees.

I decide against it. Although it might be fun, there would be risk associated with the hive.

If anyone was stung and had a serious medical issue, I might be liable.

The hive is valuable and it might be stolen or the honey purloined. I think a strong three level hive with honey might be worth a hundred or so dollars in wood and frames, and then another hundred for the bees, and another couple of hundred for the honey. It is too much temptation. If someone steals a tomato, it is no great loss, but steal the hive and it is a big loss to me.

The hive is also a target for vandalism. Some people fear bees to the point where they might want to poison them or damage the hive.

It is natural for bees to swarm, even if you take steps to avoid it. If the swarm starts in the middle of the village it would probably land on somebody’s property and they might not appreciate it.

So I will not be volunteering my bees.

University of Montana Online Beekeeping Course

February 12th, 2014

The University of Montana is offering their Apprentice-Level Beekeeper course online this year. It sounds very interesting. You can even take it for college credit. It runs from April 7-25, 2014. This is about two weeks.

My experience is that these courses require more work than you think. This is not passive sitting in a classroom and absorbing information. They offer you the opportunity to learn but there is less of what you might consider teaching. You get only as much out of them as you put in. Because it is online, it is up to you to make the effort to learn. There tends to be less teaching than you would think, and you have to be aggressive about keeping up on the lessons.

 

 

 

 

Ground Hogs Day Bee Check

February 2nd, 2014

I went out and opened the hives.

Two hives were very dead. They must have frozen in the cold weather, because there was about 80 pounds of honey between them. The bees died inches from the honey, which meant that they were too cold to leave the winter ball of bees to find food. The good news is that I have lots of deep frames of honey to use in starting my bees this Spring.

I was stung for the first time in 2014 when I opened up the other hives. I had to go get a bee veil and gloves to wear. I put a frame of honey from the dead hives in each of the live hives so that they might have some more food for the coming cold days. There were lots of bees spread out over many frames so they must have been all right.

I will start feeding them in about three weeks. As soon as we get a few days where the sugar will not freeze I’ll start putting on front feeders  so they will think that the nectar flow has started and they will start in on making brood. If the nurse bees can keep the eggs and brood warm enough there should be an increase in the number of bees. It takes 21 days to grow a bee from egg to emergence from the comb. If I can have bees coming out near the end of March they will be ready for the early Spring flowers.

At the end of March my 3 packages should arrive. If the hives have strong populations I’ll call up and ask the bee girl to pick me up a couple of queens and I’ll split the two hives. I will try to keep the good strong queens (that lived through the winter) and use a few frames of bees for the new queen in a nearby hive. When you split a hive, the new hive must be right next to the old hive or the bees will all return to the original hive. The hives must be less than three feet or more than three miles apart, otherwise the bees remember their home.

With luck, I will start the year with seven hives.