Tag: Bees

There is always some outside work waiting to be done. Why not do it when the weather is warm and the sun is shining?

An unexpected warm spell presented the perfect opportunity to get some work done on the chicken coop and beehives.

I didn't expect to harvest any honey this year, our first with the hives, but just 60 days later, we pulled our first frame of honey from one of the hives.

We opened up three hives and took a total of 62 photos to test in the BeeScanning app as a tool to measure a varroa mite infestation.

After a month, the garage had started to smell, well, like chickens. Or maybe chicken poop. The time had come to move them into their permanent home.

Only four weeks after we added bees to our hives, they have doubled in size, the bees are drawing comb, and the queen is laying lots of eggs.

We got off to a slow start back in mid-March and the weather wasn't the most cooperative, but we've finally finished building the chicken coop.

We may have small stock, but its keeping us busy! From feeding the bees to cleaning chicks with pasty butt, it's all part of a day in the life of a homseteader.

They say that when it rains it pours. That was the case today when all the livestock we had ordered months ago showed up on the same day.

After a clandestine meeting in which I slipped a woman a wad of $20s and she handed me a small, carefully built wooden box, I was the proud owner of some bees.