My small backyard near downtown St. John’s, Newfoundland, where I first kept bees.
Putting a small hive next to my house where I can see the bees from my living room window coming and going on sunny days is the smartest thing I’ve done in years.
A 2-minute video that demonstrates and explains my idea for covering the inner cover hole with canvas. It’s followed by a 20-minute version for those interested in a deeper dive into all kinds of other things.
As always with these longer videos, I explain every little thing I do while I’m doing it so that new beekeepers unfamiliar with all this stuff might be able to pick up some helpful titbits of information. I know this format isn’t quick and slick and eye-catching, and my viewership has gone down the toilet since I started doing this, but when I look back on all the videos I’ve watched over the years, it’s usually been this kind of long-form walk-along video that I’ve learned the most from — the ones where I’m just hanging out with the beekeeper while they’re beekeeping. So I’m sticking to it.
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A 7-minute casual tour through the little snowy beeyard next to my house, recorded this morning around 9:30.
I re-examine the yogurt entrance shelters, the hive pillows and generally discuss where my bees are today and what I plan to do this weekend, maybe, if I’m not too tired.
A short video demonstrating how a rim is added to the top of a hive to make room for sugar bricks, fondant or any other kind of winter feed.
Now I just need to make some sugar bricks.
Am I the only one in Newfoundland who thinks this has been an unusual and even slightly weird summer for beekeeping? Here are the hive inspections that got me thinking about this.
This came up in a Google search today.*
https://gazette.mun.ca/campus-and-community/hidden-talents-3/
It’s an article where I mention that I get anywhere between 20-50 pounds of honey per hive in the beeyard next to my house in Flatrock. That’s about right for Flatrock.
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Here’s a photo of me working on what is probably the largest hive I’ve ever had to deal with since I began beekeeping in 2010. (I’ve created a special tag just for this hive, Giant Hive 2021, so everything I’ve written about it can be viewed in sequence.)
I just got back from scraping out dead bees and debris from the bottom of some of my beehives and it looked a little something like this:
Lots of talkin’, but here are the highlights:
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An unedited visit to my beeyard that happened 30 minutes ago after a big rain storm we had last night, just me yakking and explaining a few things as well as I can explain them:
My last words in the video are a reference to the 1979 film Alien that probably no one will get, as is usually the case for references I make. I’m cool with that.
I pulled this funny looking 5-pounder of comb honey from one of my hives yesterday. No humans or bees were harmed. The honey extractor known as a “Flow Hive” would deprive me of this experience. Beekeeping, for me, is about being close to the bees. Honey is the bonus.
The first swarm I ever experienced happened around this date in 2012. I haven’t had a colony come anywhere close to being this strong since. The extraordinarily robust colonies I was able to build up during my first few years of beekeeping may have been more the result of unusually warm and sunny weather than anything else. Beekeepers should give credit where credit is due, and let’s be honest: Most of the credit goes to the weather.
I attribute most of my success in beekeeping to good weather.
24 minutes of just sitting here listening to the snow fall and the wind blow and the birds doing birdy things and all that stillness. Why not?
The video was shot on my Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphone, so the audio isn’t exactly Hi-Fi, but I’ve cranked it up so all the natural sounds jump out a little more. It’s quiet for the most part, though.
I ate some honey that’s been frozen in my freezer since 2011. It tasted like summer.
Eating honey six years after it was bottled.
This sums up my approach to beekeeping:
Page 109 from William Wharton’s (Albert du Aime’s) novel, Last Lovers.
Beekeeping is living with the possibility of error. All the time.
