Author: Queenbee

We are blessed to have had both production colonies and nucs come through the winter healthy and strong. April has been very busy trying to grow our apiaries and mange the bees’ swarm desire. We have had overwintered nucs already swarm or at least try to. Alas, our queens are clipped and have little success… Continue reading Swarming – a note on spring management

Swarm season is here! Andy is busy setting up apiaries and getting our woodenware ready. The number of our apiaries is growing and so is the number of bees and hives in each apiaries. We got them inspected just a couple weeks ago and all looks well. Our hives are healthy and robust. We have… Continue reading Swarm Season waits for no one

We are excited to start offering overwintered Nucs and Spring Nucs this year. What are they? A few years back, Andy wrote a pretty comprehensive guide for fellow club members for deciding what to purchase. In a nutshell, an overwintered nuc is a small colony with a queen raised the previous year during the summer… Continue reading Local Nucs and Genetics

The bees are mostly tucked away for winter – they will come out on sunny days in the 40s and 50s to clean up but otherwise stay in the hive and eat their stores. We have put on some insulation to help them maintain the temperatures and hope they’ve been fed and healthy enough to… Continue reading Season’s Greetings

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We have been busy! The end of the school year is near and with it a slew of concerts, ceremonies, potlucks and events. Saturday morning had us out at Camp Butler National Cemetery for the traditional flag posting by the Scouts (BSA). The rest of the weekend is for family and we are visiting Ainsworth… Continue reading May Flowers

We have had so much fun this summer and promptly forgot about updating our website… June: Bees go to school We got to attend the West Nature Grove opening ceremony. We are proud to be a partner in this teaching apiary at Lincoln Land Community College. https://www.llcc.edu/campus-map/west-lake-nature-grove July: A meeting of hives Quincy hosted the… Continue reading It’s been a busy summer

The bees have been busy making honey in spite of the horrible dry spell we are experiencing. We’re looking forward to harvesting some honey, and comb honey (!) soon and getting to supply some of our customers again. After extracting the honey, we will be rolling into getting the bees ready for fall and winter.… Continue reading Almost harvest time

Our VSH breeder queen (varroa-sensitive and hygenic) is thriving and laying. We are busy making queens to replace last year’s package queens, and making spring nucs. We are running MP-style cell builders aiming for fat, happy queens and will have some available soon for sale. The cold spring and winds delayed us a little but… Continue reading Queen Bees

We have been busy in the bee yards getting ready for the bees to expand and grow this spring. New queens are being reared to replace queens where needed (re-queening), and where we are able to split strong hives. Some hives are going through a swarm response – we’ve had a couple eerie moments when… Continue reading Swarm Season