Baraboo Bees

06/11/2024

Picture for attention because I didn’t get a chance to take pictures or videos while doing inspections.
We have 2 very young queens that emerged from some queen cells we collected. One of the cells was emerging when we found it. I put that frame along with a frame of brood/nurse bees and some resources into a nuc box. We found fresh eggs and larvae yesterday! Another frame with queen cells went into a hive that was struggling and we couldn’t find signs of the queen. They have a new queen now. When we go Wednesday I’ll put a frame or 2 of nurse bees and brood to help them build their numbers. We do have 1 hive that is queenless right now. We had done a walk away split. The other 1/2 got the queen, but we should have been seeing queen cells by now. We’ll have to find a frame with eggs to help them make a queen. Fingers crossed!

We checked the Garden hives tonight. All are heavy with bees. We had done a walk away split about a month ago. The queenless 1/2 again did not produce a queen. We gave them a frame with eggs and brood. The other hives are healthy and happy. They were completely in the shade when we arrived so we were prepared for war! They were actually pretty calm! The mosquitos were worse that the bees!

05/28/2024

We didn’t see the queen in the 2nd hive, but we did see fresh eggs so we know the queen is alive and laying!

The 3rd hive was very weak last weekend. We’re not seeing brood. We put a few frames of brood and nurse bees, along with a frame containing a queen cell. As of today she isn’t laying yet, but probably too soon.

We split an over wintered hive that was busting at the seems! That’s when the bees got a little spicy. That’s also where we lost Christina! Donna pinched a bee in her boot and got stung. I was squatting down cleaning some old frames and I may have squished a couple. All in all it was a good day and we got a lot done! If anyone else wants to join us, we’ve got extra jackets and gloves. We do our best to
Keep our guests safe and comfortable. Thanks for your help today Christina!

05/28/2024

We had a guest at the Richland Center hives today. Christina expressed an interest and I think she learned a few things today. The first few hives were nice and calm. We spotted the queen in the first hive!

05/19/2024

We did a walk away split with one of the hives at the Garden of Angels. They had 2 brood boxes that were over flowing. We just split the 2 boxes, added another deep to each. We’ll find out in about a month if it worked! We added a second brood box to the sister hive that survived winter with a single brood box. We hope to split them in a couple weeks. We treated the psychedelic hive but the treatment wand quit working. We’ll go back to the Garden in the morning.

The 2 new hives I was most worried about in Richland Center are doing great! We added a 2nd brood box to each. It may have been a little premature, but we were there and had the equipment! One of the surviving hives was busting at the seams. The new hive right next to it wasn’t doing well at all. There are deficiencies less bees than we put in that box a week ago. We didn’t see much brood, and no new eggs. We pulled a couple frames of brood and nurse bees from the surviving hive to increase numbers in the weak hive. One of the frames has a few capped queen cells so we added that as well.
In the surviving hive we found more queen cells that were capped. One was emerging! We put that frame and 3 frames of brood and nurse bees in a 4 frame nuc. They should develop into a full hive quickly since the queen was being hatched while we were there! I need to
Make more equipment for the RC hives!! We’ll try to get down there one night this week for mite treatment!
I grabbed some still shots from the wrap up videos today. It would have been a great day to have the camera running while the hives were open! I personally have never seen a queen starting to emerge before today!

05/12/2024

We stopped at home to charge the battery. We ended up fixing the wires on the treatment wand. Pay attention to the few bees that had made their way out of the nuc boxes. The first video in the comments will be what we found when we opened the back of the truck when we got to Richland Center!

05/12/2024

We picked up 4 nucs today to take to Richland Center. We stopped at the Garden of Angels to inspect hives and set up a plan to get the brood out of the honey supers. I’ll post more videos in comments.

05/06/2024

We cleaned up the hives today. No video from the Richland Center hives. They were GRUMPY!!. I’ll post videos of The Garden of Angels hives in the comments since FB insists I make a Reel video. The Garden has 3 strong hives that we’ll split soon. Joanne said the bees were spicy so we used smoke right away. They were actually very manageable today. The Richland Center hives have always been pretty docile so we weren’t concerned. Mistake #1. We did what we had to do and left. We’re getting 4 new nucs for Richland. We need to set 1 more hive. We’ll do 2 splits which means we need more equipment. Enjoy the videos!

02/11/2024

I took a video of adding supplemental resources to the hives today. Apparently I can’t post a video without making it a “reels” video. (Video is in the comments)
The Garden of Angels has 3 surviving hives of the 5 we winterized. The bees were up in the honey supers meaning that with the warmer weather they were running out of food. With the warmer weather the bees are more active, and therefore use more resources. One of the dead out hives had all the bees on top of the frames. We didn’t take the hive apart, but it’s possible that we didn’t arrive soon enough with the emergency feed.

The Richland Center hives had 2 surviving hives when we winterized. Both of those hives are still alive. They are still down in the brood boxes, so they still have food left in the honey supers. They work their way up in the winter, and will move down in the spring. We sometimes rotate the boxes in the spring to make them start storing honey in the bottom box first.

So far we have an over 50% survival rate since we winterized. Fingers crossed they will continue to thrive! We ordered 4 nucs for this spring and we can start doing splits off the strongest hives as soon as nectar starts flowing!

08/22/2023

If you have never been to the Garden of Angels, it is a must see! The Garden offers unabridged love and acceptance. The Garden offers peace, understanding and beauty. Joanne does so much for our community, please add this to your destination this sunmer and support someone doing so much good in this world. Right now The Garden is collecting Socks for Detox (one of the most needed things for people in Detox is new socks). Please consider bringing a package of new socks and making a donation to the Garden! And while you are there take a peek at our hives! Joanne should have honey for sale soon as well (all money raised helps The Garden).

https://www.facebook.com/altblossoms?mibextid=D4KYlr

Come on out and pick some flowers. My mission is to spread love to others. Take some flowers to someone in need of some LOVE.

08/20/2023

It was so hot I decided to do the wrap up video from the safety and air conditioned comfort of my truck! Now it’s time to hop on the motorcycles and celebrate our anniversary!

08/20/2023

Not a lot of video taken today. The intro video was short because they saw me without gloves and decided they wanted a piece of me early on!

I had to take a quick ride to get some Gatorade because I was dehydrated. Donna stayed and inspected while I was gone. JoAnne was keeping an eye on her because we have a rule about opening hives alone. Feeling better when I returned and we did end up harvesting some honey!

08/13/2023

Extraction day for the first of this year’s honey. We have a lot more sitting on the hives, but we need empty frames for the bees to use! Pictures show our very basic equipment, uncapping, spinning and straining. They honey will stay in the bucket for a few days to allow air bubbles and any small wax particles float to the top. We remove those with a piece of cellophane and then bottle! I gotta say, the bees made some delicious honey this year!