I know it isn’t always too exciting, but one of the purposes of this website is to document anything new I haven’t seen before and to take note of when certain things happen so that I, as a novice beekeeper stumbling through all this mostly on my own, will have a reference for next year’s beekeeping — and maybe others can learn from my experience. I don’t have access to any kind of beekeeping association that might allow me to compare notes with other beekeepers in Newfoundland — because there is no association, and there aren’t many beekeepers either. So just for my records, here’s a short video of the bees flying around my backyard today about an hour after I removed some useless hive top feeders and replaced them with inverted jar feeders sheltered inside some medium supers.
January 2019 Postscript: A beekeeping association in Newfoundland didn’t exist in 2011 when I was desperate to compare notes with other beekeepers on the island. Then around 2015, a group of people fulfilled the legal requirements to be recognized by the government as an association with a president, a vice-president and so on. As much as I had always hoped for an association, I could tell right away it wasn’t a good fit for me. I’m currently not a member.
Something very cool happened today. I’ll get a post up later tonight. I’ll tell you this, though: I put a candy cake into one of the hives because they don’t seem to be interested in syrup. I didn’t use the smoker — and that makes all the difference. I could have done the whole operation without any gloves, maybe even without my veil (though I won’t try that for a while). The bees were not at all defensive. They acted like I wasn’t even there.
I love that.