Bee Log

​Last year I started beekeeping but didn’t get a single ounce of honey.  Some may view this as a failure but I don’t.  I bought a bee package which contains three pounds of bees and a queen.  For some reason the bees didn’t accept the queen, she died.  A hive can’t survive without a queen.  I bought another queen.  My luck didn’t change, the second queen died.
My beekeeping venture is not a lonely undertaking; a friend and I are working together.  After my second queen died, we combined our bees into one big hive.  As luck would have it the merger didn’t happen until June which we learned was too late to expect any honey production.  We also learned too late that you have to buy a special box called a “super” for the bees to make honey that we could then extract.
Our goal for 2015 became getting the bees to survive a Wisconsin winter.  We learned at one of the monthly Mad Bee Association meetings we could expect to lose 50-100% of our bees over winter.  As I wrote in a previous blog our bees not only survived but prospered in early spring this year.  On April 14th we checked our hive, drones were already hatching and we had a ton of bees.  We split the one hive back into two hives and began giving them 50/50 mix syrup to hold them over until blooms started popping.  The split prevents bees from swarming.   As it turns out bees don’t like overcrowding in the hive.  When there are too many bees in a hive a bunch decide to leave all and once and swarm away to create a new colony.  I’m sold that a swarm of bees can be caught but that’s not for me.  It’s better to add to their housing.
We also bought two more bee packages this year. My friend’s wife isn’t fond of the bees and couldn’t tolerate two more hives on their property so I decided to put one hive in my backyard.  I’m lucky; my wife likes bees – at least for now.  I researched hive location and spent several days tracking the sun’s path in our backyard to find just the right place for my new hive.  The perfect place turns out to be near the top of the hill in front of a small grove of four pine trees.  The hive gets early morning sun and is protected from afternoon boiling sun and strong westerly winds by the pine trees.  The bees came from Florida and our Wisconsin weather has been an adjustment.  We’ve had highs in the mid-40’s so I didn’t see any bees for three days.  The other day I checked to make sure the queen had successfully exited her traveling apartment – she did.  The bees were all huddled together in the center of the hive keeping themselves warm.
So far so good.  I’ve decided to keep a bee log this year so we create a record of what we did and when we did it.  I think agriculture, including beekeeping, is the mother of record keeping in human society.