THE FOLLOWING WAS UPDATED WITH A VIDEO & PHOTOS ON FEB. 02, 2012
(ANOTHER SLOW NEWS DAY AT MUD SONGS).
Yup. It’s still winter.
I hear that honey bees in the UK are starting to bring in pollen. Well, goody for them.
Read on . . . »
It was -14°C today with a -26°C (-15°F) wind chill. The hives bore it well.
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Only another three months to go, if we’re lucky.
Continued in Gone Away is The Bluebird.
A word of caution to beekeepers who use hard insulation in their hives for any reason: some ants have an appetite for insulation. Check out this photo sent to me from a beekeeper in Indiana:
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I doubt this kind of infestation would be an issue for beekeepers on the island of Newfoundland or in similar climates (though you might want to look around for ant nests). Ants are usually long gone and out of sight by the time we have to put on insulation in November, or take it off in April. I suppose that’s a benefit of living in one of the chilliest, wettest, windiest places on the planet.
Read on . . . »
2011 wasn’t a good year for beekeepers on the east coast of Newfoundland. We had a late wet spring, a short cold summer, and we (i.e., the royal we, as in I’m talking about yours truly) made plenty of mistakes along the way. But we managed to harvest about 20kg of honey from our two established hives and it was all worth it.
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Here are some photos from 2011 (about 100 photos, approximately 5 minutes):
Read on . . . »
I bought plastic queen excluders when I first got into beekeeping in 2010. But I kept hearing about the superiority of metal queen excluders, how the bees hardly fill them up with propolis and wax. So I did a test and here are the results:
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Based on these results, because I have no other practical experience to go on, I’ve decided to use plastic queen excluders for our new hives next year. I’ll still use the metal queen excluder and I’ll update this post next fall if next year’s results are different.
I don’t know how many honey bees can live in a typical Langstroth hive. I’ve had experienced beekeepers tell me that 25,000 to 30,000 bees can live in a single deep super. Assuming that a typical Langstroth hive consists of two deep supers, that’s 50,000 to 60,000 bee per hive. I’ve heard those numbers thrown around more than once. But who was the first person to count the number of bees in a hive? How were those numbers confirmed? I have no idea.
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This topic came up in a conversation I had with a someone on Google Plus today. I threw out the 50,000-bees-per-hive number I’ve been told many times, and then I immediately questioned it and decided to take some measurements and crunch my own numbers. This is what I came up with:
Read on . . . »
I know some new beekeepers in eastern Newfoundland who read Mud Songs from time to time. If you’re reading this around 1pm on Friday, now would be a good time to weigh down your hives if you haven’t done so already.
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According to the CBC, Hurricane Maria should smack into us right about now with winds around 120km/h (75mph), plus a whole lotta rain. My hives are well protected from the wind and have weathered through worse storms than this. But if your hives are out in the open, you might want to take some precautions.
So I says to Mabel, I says…
Romaine lettuce, anyone?
I’m not sure why it is, but one or two bees are always drinking water droplets off our lettuce.
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