First and foremost, Happy Mother’s Day to all my fellow bloggers and to my wonderful Momma!

We are officially a month into our 2018 beekeeping season! Luke and I were checking in with our bees this weekend and I realized I hadn’t composed a post yet detailing the arrival of our honeybees. Unfortunately, our three hives from last year didn’t make it through the winter, so this year we ordered five boxes of three pounds of honeybees.  As often happens this time of the year Luke and I find ourselves beyond busy from family functions to helping out on our family farm.  If you add in a bachelor party in Vegas and my mother in law having surgery, which went swimmingly, it was a jam packed month.

The week our bees arrived we were finally experiencing beautiful weather, as Michigan finally seemed to pull away from winter’s firm grasp. Alas, it was also our busiest week of the year as they were delivered on a Tuesday, Luke’s mom has her surgery Wednesday and Luke was leaving for Vegas on Friday.  Tackling the potentially overwhelming week day by day, we got our bees settled in their new homes on that Thursday. In previous years we’d had our bees housed in Saginaw, MI at Luke’s Grandparent’s farm. Due to their heartbreaking passing over the past year we moved our bees down to our farm in Waldron, MI.  With the crazy week going smoothly, we heaved a big sigh of relief. That is until we checked the forecast for the next week.

Adding to an already stressful week, the forecast for the following week, starting on that Sunday, was bleak to say the least. Winter wanted to have one last go at Michigan, as we were set to have freezing temperatures, with snow and ice.  After dropping Luke off at the airport on Friday, I drove back to Waldron and loaded a pickup truck’s worth of straw with the help of my Dad to help insulate our poor, just acclimating bees. We ended up packing the straw around the hives and building a wind block to hopefully protect them enough to get through this cold snap.

Warm weather finally reemerged late the next week much to our relief.  Even though we were planning on driving down to the farm on that Friday, my Dad thankfully walked back to the hives to check in on our little guys that Thursday.  As you can imagine, finding out our bees were still quite active did wonders for our level of worry.

Well as of mid May four of our hives are doing very well and one hive we are a bit worried about. So far moving the bees down to our farm has been fun as my parents, Grandparents, and siblings have all been out to see our hives. Or help run us out an odd tool or item we’d left up at the house.  We are currently debating names for our five hives. I’m personally leaning toward the Spice Girls and Luke likes the Russian Five (Detroit Red Wings). We’ll have to see what names stick. As a whole, we are really excited for our upcoming year as we have our first ever request for wedding party favors! After pricing it out for our friend, it was surprisingly cheap compared to online options and I’m excited to see how the final product turns out! Stay tuned for a new update in a month or two to see what progress our busy bees have been up to!