2019 Honey Bee Update – #1


Friends! Our 2019 beekeeping season has officially kicked off. Last year was an especially frustrating year for our hives, with the issues compounding as a result of Michigan’s polar vortex this winter. In previous years we’d purchased 3 lb. packages of bees, whereas this year we decided to change to established nucs that you can see in the photos below sitting on top of the supers. We split our four hives up this year with two on our farm with its 30 acres of CRP grassland that hasn’t been farmed in approximately 30 years. The other two hives we moved just down the road to a beautiful wooded lot where my Grandpa’s childhood home used to stand and where he was born. This piece of property is so beautiful we actually had our family photos taken here last year.

In the photo below you can spot our beautiful queen bee? Here’s a hint, she has a pink dot on her thorax.

I’m totally biased but I love this view of our farm, although I’d appreciate it more if those weren’t rain clouds in the distance. We have yet to get our crops in due to the incessant rain. Regardless, here’s to the beginning of a new beekeeping season!


8 comments

  1. Good luck with the bees and the crops! We’ve been plagued by rain and floods here in Nebraska, and a lot of farmers haven’t been able to get their crops in, either, assuming their fields weren’t destroyed in the big floods we had in March.

    Liked by 1 person

    • Thanks Kim! Luke and I were just commenting last night how farmers in that region must be in even worst straights than we are because we’ve seen large storm after storm go through there. Let alone the terrible flooding!

      Like

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