May 2025 | Package Installation

Sante once again welcomed us to his fantastic beeyard. He also experienced quite a few deadouts over the winter and showed us how he installs a package of bees. One particularly interesting feature is the setup in front of the hive — after shaking most of the bees into the box, he places the package in front of the entrance so the remaining bees can walk in on their own. The advantage: dead bees are left behind.

We also took a close look at the Flow Hives with great interest — maybe there’ll be a meeting one day where we get to see the Flow Hive in action…

Winter 2024 | Winter prep, storage, bee stuff

The final meetings are taking place: Do the bees have enough winter stores? What’s the mite count? Do I need to treat? Should I add insulation? — So many questions, especially if you’re new to beekeeping.

Sante is a very experienced beekeeper. He showed us how he insulates the hives using the inner cover, and how he treats with oxalic acid. Feeding is still done with syrup; when it gets colder, he switches to fondant or sugar dough.

As a general guideline: oxalic acid treatment is typically done around Thanksgiving, once the first night frosts have hit and the queen has stopped laying (ideally).

Also attached is an idea for storing honey supers: I froze them for 2–3 days and then sealed them in vacuum bags. Over the winter, it’s a good idea to check on them occasionally to make sure everything is still okay.

On a warm winter day, feel free to set out some water for the bees — they’ll gladly take it.

Now it’s slowly time to turn the wax into candles or creams — and who knows, maybe someone’s up for making a batch of honey liqueur?

2021 | May Beekeepers Meeting

Andy will walk us through a hive split!

We hope you’ll join us for our next beekeepers meeting, Saturday, the 15th.

It’s on Zoom and live on Facebook, starting at 10:30am.

Abbott has volunteered to demonstrate hiving his new nucs and Andy and Eric will walk us through hive splits.

Thanks to Gabriella, we have a great event host and she will monitor the chat for questions to ask of our beekeepers.

We hope you’ll join us!

Best Laid Plans . . .

So we tried to be all organized and set up the year’s worth of Beekeeper meetings in advance.

We all know how that worked out!

Not to be deterred, we are going to have a ‘virtual’ beekeepers meeting using the Zoom platform.

See the details here.

We hope to ‘see you there’!

To get the full details, be sure to sign up for our email list and we’ll send out all of the information towards the end of the week.