Hotham Family Apiary

that is all. Actually, that isn't all. Saturday was one of those touch-and-go days as far as weather goes. Most of the day was pleaant and sunny, temps in the upper 70s. This was good, right up until I was inspecting the third frame of the first colony. It started to rain and to thunder. That's when things started to get hairy. I noticed that the bees were beginning to become more restless. No amount of smoke was calming them down either. As soon as I could, I closed up the hive and decided to leave them alone. Just as I placed the last frame in, a bee stung me on my right thumb and two more somehow made their way into the sleeves of my shirt.The other two escaped without stinging, which was good for me. Regardless, I was a bit frsutrated because I was hoping to get a bit more work done, so I decided to come back later. After the stormy weather, and about two hours, had passed, I went back out and finished up the work. I cut out the drone frames and added a second brood cha...

On Saturday, 29th of April, I checked in on the colonies. Development is very slow right now, due mostly to the poor weather conditions of the last two weeks. It was however interesting to see that the bees have begun drawing out the drone frames at a pretty good pace. Colonies 1 and 3 have drawn out approxiamately 30% of the drone frames. Colony 2 is a little slower and has only drawn out about 20% of the drone frame. I also placed the queen excluder on all three colonies and will just let the bees store honey in the second chamber that I gave them on the 15th. Today I stopped by once again, just to see how they were flying as we had two consecutive days of sunshine and relatively warm weather. The bees were flying very well, but colony 2 is just not quite as strong as the other two colonies at this point. A lot can of course change in the next two weeks. All three colonies have queens that are laying well in the brood nest. Since there is a lot of brood in all three (ca. 7 frames) ...