🐝💗Our Backyard Beekeeping Journey!💗🐝

[drstratton]

As the temps approach 105°, I thought I would share a video of the girls trying to cool off the hive.

A bee can move their wings 200-300 times a second... amazing!

 

[drstratton]

A video looking up into the hive through the screened bottom board.

 

[drstratton]

On a cucumber blossom!

 

[drstratton]

I was sitting out by my hive a few weeks ago, watching them jet out and come in. It was so mesmerizing. They move so fast. I decided to take a slow motion video of them.

 

[drstratton]

After my above post, @R2elk Shared this. It was so funny, I have to share it here too.

Where is the Air Traffic Controller when you need one?

 

[drstratton]

July 19th, 2025

We've been gone for a few days. It was quite warm when we got home, so I waited to do some of my outside chores until this evening. I was deadheading the flowers in my bee garden when I was blessed with this beautiful sunset.

We will be inspecting our hives on Tuesday, to assess how many honey frames will be ready to be extracted next week. We will also be bottling a portion of the honey we already extracted. I have a long list of friends & family to share with. We're also donating a couple of jars to our senior center fundraiser auction. It's going to bee a busy week.

 

[drstratton]

July 20th, 2025

We're finally getting around to planting a wildflower mix. We previously planted, Joe Pye weed, Butterfly weed, golden rod, catmint, goatsbeard and several other bee friendly plants. Those are in the back of this area.

Just for fun! I love bees on my flowers!

 

[drstratton]

Here's some of the flowers the girls are loving right now.

Dahlias & cosmos

Alium

Blackeyed Susan

Blanket flower

More dahlias

They even land on the marigolds

 

[drstratton]

My first gift jars of honey.

 

[drstratton]

July 22nd, 2025

Did our inspection today. The bees were nice and calm (I understand that can change), so far we've been blessed. We saw lots of eggs, larvae and capped brood. The queens also had plenty of space to continue laying. We will probably extract about 8 more frames of honey next week. Then nothing until/if we get a nectar flow from buckwheat.

Nuc hive #1
Capped brood

Eggs

Nuc Hive # 2
Capped brood

Lots of room for the queen to lay.

Capped honey

Package Hive
Capped brood

Swarm hive
Capped brood, Eggs & larvae

Capped brood, eggs & larvae

If you zoom in, you can see the eggs & larvae on some of the pictures. The eggs are like tiny grains of rice, standing on end.

I found one thing in our hive that doesn't belong there. A small hive beetle. Thankfully they won't survive in our area for very long. Too hot and sandy for them to breed. It might have come from some commercial hives that were brought in to pollinate the buckwheat. They can fly up to 10 miles to find a new hive to infest. If not kept in check they can destroy a hive and cause the bees to abandon it. Their larvae do the most damage. Hopefully we found this one before it laid any eggs. We will inspect every frame of the hive next week.

We will also test for Varroa mites next week. Hopefully the count will be low, but I'm not holding my breath. We need to keep the counts low, so that the hives will stay strong and make it through winter.