Welcome - Explore my Blog

I've been keeping this blog for all of my beekeeping years and I am beginning my 19th year of beekeeping in April 2024. Now there are more than 1300 posts on this blog. Please use the search bar below to search the blog for other posts on a subject in which you are interested. You can also click on the "label" at the end of a post and all posts with that label will show up. At the very bottom of this page is a list of all the labels I've used.

Even if you find one post on the subject, I've posted a lot on basic beekeeping skills like installing bees, harvesting honey, inspecting the hive, etc. so be sure to search for more once you've found a topic of interest to you. And watch the useful videos and slide shows on the sidebar. All of them have captions. Please share posts of interest via Facebook, Pinterest, etc.

I began this blog to chronicle my beekeeping experiences. I have read lots of beekeeping books, but nothing takes the place of either hands-on experience with an experienced beekeeper or good pictures of the process. I want people to have a clearer picture of what to expect in their beekeeping so I post pictures and write about my beekeeping saga here.Master Beekeeper Enjoy with me as I learn and grow as a beekeeper.

Need help with an Atlanta area swarm? Visit Found a Swarm? Call a Beekeeper. ‪(404) 482-1848‬

Want to Pin this post?

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

This is my 900th Post! Blue Heron Inspections in July and August


I can't believe this is my 900th post. Fitting, since I've been showing so much throughout the other 899 posts about inspecting the beehive, that this post is about two inspections at the Blue Heron. I've been so tied up this summer with moving on July 15 and with teaching at Emory, as I do every summer, that I've gotten behind.

Here, then, is the slideshow from the Blue Heron inspection on July 10. We combined two hives into one - one was the weak nuc we got as a donation and the other was the long-queenless hive that apparently did not accept the donated queen that we got on the same day as the nuc.

First you'll see the inspection of Julia's hive including removing a frame of honey for harvest. Then you'll see the combination of the two weak hives.



We went back to inspect these hives this past weekend on August 14. We've been away from these hives for a little over a month.

Julia wasn't with us and so we didn't get many pictures. I took some of Noah inspecting his and Julia's hive but didn't take any during the inspection of my hive, so you'll just have to read about my part.

The slideshow is below. Noah's hive looked good - with honey, brood, and some small hive beetles but not as many as we have seen before.

My combined hive had no newspaper left between the boxes. The original nuc hive had a black queen from Jennifer Berry's stock. We did not see her but did see an opened queen cell as well as the queen.

This queen was golden and lovely and looked just like the queen I had installed about six weeks ago into the queenless hive half of the combo with the weak nuc. I wonder if she killed off the black queen or if she is a new queen that the bees made. They have had time to make a new queen and for her to be laying since we introduced that donated queen.

We did see lots of eggs and small brood in the combined hive and the hive appeared to be doing well. Cindy wants us to essentially give her back the nuc she gave us in a split from this hive (which she was hoping for in August). However, there's no way this hive is in any kind of shape to split so we'll have to give her back her nuc in the spring.



Interesting stats at this 900th post:
There are 448 of you who follow me on Blogger, 817 who subscribe by RSS feed, and 60 who follow me on Twitter. There are visitors to this site from 180 countries in the world. So far in August there have been 7771 pageloads of these blog pages.

1 comment:

  1. What a fabulous Blog! Congratulations on all you have achieved. I've only just started out and your blog certainly gives me something to aspire to.

    ReplyDelete

Pin this post

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...