While I was accepting exhibits for our county fair, a man came with honey. A man who only lives about 10 miles from our place. Of course I had to ask if he had bees, which of course he did. So we got chatting and long story short, he offered to come check our hive and help us out a bit with our bees as we still are below novice in the bee department.
He came over with his smoker, suit, veil, etc. and we took him out to the hive. But when we opened the hive, there were only a handful of bees in it. Turns out we should have had the second box on them right after getting them home since they were already established and the trays in the first box were already mostly full at that point. So, at some point between when we had our other friend check them and when this guy opened the box, they swarmed and found somewhere else to live. Very disappointing.
I had not been out to check them for a long time, but hadn’t been concerned about them because they are regular visitors to the herb garden. They especially like the borage. There are 5-8 bees at our little borage patch every time I go out there.
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Yes, those are my bees at my borage, but they don’t live in my hive anymore. :(
So our new bee friend left us with some good advice, a list of things we’ll need, and we’ll start again with a new bunch of bees next spring. We cut the honey that was left in the hive out, so it’s not a total loss and sweet husband will be cleaning out the rest of the hive slats and getting new foundation for them and a “super” so the bees can have two boxes to live in and we get the super for our honey. Maybe we’ll get this to work next year. Especially now we’ve got a super helpful friend in the bee hobby that doesn’t live too far away to help us out.
