Today is the Birthday of the Blog!

Happy Birthday to the Blog!













Today I begin my eighth year of beekeeping!  It's been a great ride so far and I appreciate everyone who visits, watches my slide shows and videos, comments, and emails - and there are lots of you.

This is my 1088th post on this blog.  I've shared with you all of my triumphs and failures, what I've tried and what has worked and what has not.  I've been through several iterations of my beekeeping self, but I've always remained true to what I believed in at the beginning - that it would be better to lose bees than to treat them with poisons and that I wanted to be as natural a beekeeper as possible.  I've tried to be a beekeeper and not a bee-haver, as per George Imrie, and I work hard at it.

I usually put up stats in this post, so here I go again.

1040 - people subscribe to this blog by RSS feed
552 - people are "followers" on Google
8000 - hits for this blog since April 1, according to statcounter.com
193 - the number of countries from which people have visited
146,971 - the number of links to my site from various places  on the web - it's been my particular pleasure to find that my site is listed on a number of state and club websites across the country as a good resource!  What a compliment!

Thanks, everyone, for coming to visit, for cheering me on, for all the support and friendly outreach over these past seven years!  You're the best.

Thank you all for your interest in my bees

When I woke up this morning, I found myself looking at statistics on this blog.

• I've kept the blog since April 15, 2006, the day I got my first bees (the Saturday before Easter that year). I am now a little over a month into my fourth year.
• As of today, the 28th of May 2009, there are 365 people who subscribe to my blog through RSS feed and
• An additional 200 people are "followers" of this blog
• I put a stat counter on the blog on May 10 2006. On that day 14 people visited my blog
• Yesterday May 27, 2009, 316 people visited the blog and loaded 574 pages
• Of those, 249 were visiting the blog for the first time
• Since I put the counter on the blog, 103,333 unique people have been here
• Last month I put a "flag counter" on the side bar and in just the past month people have visited this blog from 92 different countries
• I also have a map at the very bottom of the blog showing red dots for the places from which people come and it's fun to see dots all over the world
• The top ten Google search terms that got people to my site last week were:
  

1. Solar wax melter;
   
2. small hive beetle trap;
   
3. mortician bees;
   
4. harvesting honey without an extractor;
   
5. linda's bees;
   
6. hive beetle trap;
   
7. crush and strain honey;
   
8. linda's bee blog;
   
9. hive beetle; and
   
10. small hive beetle

• According to Google analytics, the most popular pages on my site in the last month (as in most months) were:

1. the video on how to use the simple solar wax melter
2. the video on harvesting honey using the crush and strain method
3. the video on building the small hive beetle trap
4. the newbie questions at the beginning of keeping bees
5. what's involved in a hive inspection
6. how to install a nuc
   

Keeping a blog is a commitment I made to myself to force me to keep up with what was happening in my hives in a somewhat organized way. Having so many other people keep up with what I am doing makes it really a lot of fun.

Thank you, everyone, for the interest, the comments and the emails. I hope all of you who are beekeepers are having as much fun and learning as much as I am in the tiny world of the beehive.

Linda T