The price of experience

Today was windy, but pretty warm, so we finally decided to open up the beehive and see how our diminished colony was faring. We found complete devastation. Every bee had died, some in clusters; many were inside comb cells, with only their backs sticking out, making a beautiful pattern. We found no signs of mites....

Bee care and the Common Ground Fair

We checked the hives on this gorgeous last day of September.  One of the workshops we attended at the Common Ground Fair last Saturday was on “Keeping Your Hive Alive in Winter.” It was an hour-long checklist of our shortcomings as beekeepers. The expert, Lincoln Sennett from Swan’s Honey in Albion, Maine, said that a...

Bees

People have kept bees for thousands of years,vyet despite a wealth of accessible accumulated knowledge, Cherisse and I keep winging it when it comes to our hives.  When we took four frames of honey a couple of weeks ago (two from each hive), we harvested it without any of the proper tools—simply scraping off the...

Irene and the past three days

Hurricane Irene took out our power, phone and internet service, and so I haven’t been able to post anything—just when I was getting started! I have been writing posts out, however, and so here they are, starting with Sunday: 8/28/11 So often solutions don’t occur to you until it is too late. Saturday was spent...