Happy New Year and Hope it's a good Bee Year

I'm rather glad to see the beginning of a new year - while it does make me older and older, I am glad to shut the door on 2014.  I had a hard beekeeping year in 2014.  I had an injured leg for most of the year, falling on Christmas day, 2013, and in a cast for much of the summer.  My bee season activities were limited and especially my early spring start up was limited by my injury.

Now I am all better - it was a one year-to-heal injury and indeed took until Christmas 2014 to be fully better.

In addition, I had my kitchen in my tiny house redone over the summer and that too interfered with my beekeeping because it was just so hard to get to the hives.

So in my back yard are some dead hives and some obviously live ones.  Two of the liveliest hives are a split that I made from a swarm hive and a hive that is two years old from a swarm near Northlake mall.  My third active and interesting hive is one that I never consolidated going into winter.  I also didn't harvest from it.  As a result it is still six or seven boxes tall.  Maybe it seems like a tree to the bees who are living there.  We'll see if they make it all the way through the winter.  And there are some others still living and hopefully hanging on until spring.

This year 2015, I am hoping to use my queen castle that I bought last year and was then unable to use.  I am hoping to keep my sights smaller and focus more on my home hives than expanding.

My hive at Chastain died mid summer - not unlikely from the poison that is used at the Chastain Conservancy - Roundup was sprayed within feet of our hives there.  I don't plan to replace that hive.

I have live bees in Rabun County, in my backyard, at the Morningside community garden (I hope they are alive), at my friend Tom's house, and at the Inn.   I am not expanding this coming year and will focus on whatever hives make it through the winter.

So I am planning to be a focused and intense beekeeper this year, 2015.  I plan to put lots of energy into the state bee club where the leadership is extremely positive and supportive.  My friend Julia and I are in charge of the "spring" meeting in February this year and we are setting up what purports to be a great conference.  And my friend Gina and I edit the newsletter for GBA (Spilling the Honey).  I love working on that with Gina and will continue to do that in the next year.

So my bee resolutions for 2015 are:

1.  To be the best beekeeper I can be
2.  To focus on quality and not on quantity for both bee hive numbers and honey production
3.  To put out (with Gina) the best state newsletter possible
4.  To support the Georgia Beekeepers Association in every way I can
5.  To help new beekeepers to get started in whatever way I find to do so.

Happy New Year to all my Beekeeping Friends and Readers!

Hope you have the best bee year ever.....

A Beekeeper's New Year

First let me share our beekeeper's cocktail:  a chunk of honey comb, an ounce of honey liqueur, a squirt of lemon juice and champagne.  This is what we started the New Year's dinner with at my daughter's house last night:

I'm celebrating many things about beekeeping:

1.  That I am a beekeeper and have this marvelous opportunity to peek into the lives of fascinating insects and be a part of their growth and progress

2.  That my friend Gina and I are editing the GBA Newsletter together and are having a fabulous time - getting to know beekeepers across the state, sharing the ways people in Georgia manage their bees, and learning about putting together both a newsletter and a website for it.

3.  That my son-in-law, Jeff, and I have gotten to work the bees together, harvest honey together, and do various bee projects together for the last couple of years.

4.  That Julia, Noah, and I will continue to do hive inspections for the Metro club together at the Chastain Conservancy - I love anything I get to do with the two of them

5.  That Julia and I will be in charge of the Metro Atlanta Short Course in January 2014, giving us a big project to work on together all year

6.  That I have 1002 people who subscribe to this blog through Google and 539 people who "follow" this blog - all people who are interested in learning more about bees and beekeeping through whatever I choose to post

My New Year's resolutions about beekeeping:

1.  To clean up my side bars on this blog - I'd like to take off links that aren't so useful and add some that are.  If you know of a particularly good web site for beekeeping that I should link to, please let me know.  Don't send my blogs that only have one or two posts a year, but if you do know active, helpful websites that I haven't listed, please help me with this resolution.

2.  To continue natural beekeeping, even if I lose hives in the process and to stick to my guns about not using poison, chemicals, etc. in my bee hives.  My hives at Stonehurst were part of a UGA study and showed up with lots of chemical residue in spite of my not adding anything and using no foundation.  I need to research what chemicals they may use in the gardens at Stonehurst....or maybe the bees are bringing in poison from the Atlanta Botanical Garden where there are no weeds.

3.  To try to learn to make a good lotion from beeswax, something I have not been able to achieve in a way that makes me happy

4.  To finish reading some of the bee books that I've started but haven't finished.

5.  To do a better beekeeping management job in 2013 - I was behind and never did some of the things I should have done to be a good beekeeper in 2012 - this will be a different year.

Happy New Year to everyone - if you want to share your beekeeping resolutions, please do - hearing what others are focused on is always inspiring to me.