Our New Chastain Park Apiary

Julia, Noah and I are so honored that we have been given permission to have a "small apiary" at the Chastain Park Conservancy.  I'll post some pictures of the conservancy office area later, but for now you can see the golf course in the background.

To get to the Conservancy, I have to drive across the golf cart path, so it's a careful, slow drive to get to the Conservancy….not much different than entering a bee hive.  Chastain Park is the largest in the city of Atlanta - 260 acres - so we are taking up a tiny bit of space.

The Conservancy has its offices in a quonset hut - really!  It is spacious and amazing in its capacity to serve many purposes, but they do not allow a photo of it to grace the web page so until I take one, I can't share it with you.  I also need to take a photo of Chuck, the goat who lives on the Conservancy grounds!

The hives to the left belong to Noah and Julia.  We are all starting new packages and all in medium boxes.  This should be great if we ever need to transfer a frame of brood and eggs from one hive to another.  It is also a lovely space for people to observe an inspection.

We will still keep hives at the Blue Heron.  Over there we have 2Cat, a swarm hive that Noah will manage, and Lisa's hive, a donated hive that I will manage.  We may occasionally take inspection groups over there as well.



My job at this apiary today was to check to see if my hive had released the queen and if she were laying.
I also planned to remove the feeder if they had built out a full box of wax.



They had indeed built out beautiful wax.  You can see eggs in these cells.  I was so excited to see how well these bees were doing that I forgot to remove the empty queen cage - oh, well, I'll get it next time.



I also added a new box and moved two frames up to be a ladder to the new box.