This past winter was low snow and warmer than normal. I was not happy, as I love to ski, but my bees are happy. The bees are so happy with the warm weather, and they came out of their hibernation and are buzzing with gay abandon!
I'm beyond happy that I didn't lose any hives this winter, which is really amazing as most bee keepers do lose some hives every winter. I left my hives with lots of honeycomb so that they wouldn't run out of food stores, and would come out of the winter with vigor and a growing population.
Polar bears aren’t the only ones getting screwed by our rapidly shifting climate. Bees are seriously struggling with climate change—as if they didn’t have enough problems already. Because they're tiny insects, bees aren't widely addressed as one of the potentially devastating casualties of climate change, but we should all be paying closer attention. It’s well known that without bees, humans would be in big trouble. Just imagine your local grocery store—even a produce palace like Whole Foods—with a virtually barren produce section. That’s what's at risk if we lose the bees—a whopping percentage of our global food supply. And let's be honest, bees already have a loaded plate. As they continue dealing...
We love the snow, but this week has reminded us that spring is around the corner and now we can’t wait for the warmer and longer and sunnier days ahead.
Every spring beekeepers have to take stock of their bee hives. Which ones are strong and which ones are weak. The strong have amazing build up of population, because the queen is laying like crazy, and the weak have a queen that is really just walking around the combs not doing anything! So that's where re-queening comes in. You have to remove the queen who is not doing anything and introduce a new one. This sounds easy, but does not always go the way you think it should! Yesterday, I opened a few queen cages that had been in their new hives and most f them just walked out and were accepted by the hive. But one decided this was...
