Author Archives: libhart
It’s swarm season. Almost. We’re not quite there, but adventurous and successful hives have felt the warm days and decided to give it a go anyway. I’ve had two calls as well as a second year beekeeper calling for assistance after finding half a dozen swarm cells in her hives. The first of the two […]
Short post. I finally marked my first queen the other day. I was also wearing my headcam. Over the winter I scored a really great deal on a ContourHD head cam. The mounting is still a bit off. I stitched some wide industrial velcro to the side of my jacket-attached veil. The camera is off […]
Can’t wait for swarm season. If the weather holds out I think it’ll be fast and furious this year. I just finished making a beevac for it. Sometimes swarms are so easy that you can just put them right into a box, but this method means no returning later. All credit for the design goes […]
One Down
By libhart | March 5, 2012
So I’ve lost a hive. Coca is a deadout this winter. This was a Rossman package with its original queen. The clean out showed about a 3-4″ wide strip of stores at the back of most frames in the second and third box. The problem seemed to be that the bees began to rear brood […]
As I wrote in an earlier post, the idea of a sustainable apiary has been making the rounds as a new sort of goal for which to shoot. In that earlier post I wondered how possible this was, and how many hives I’d need to keep to achieve it. This felt like a math problem. The […]