News

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

We finally updated our apiary host letter. What is that? It’s a letter to property owners asking if they would be interested in hosting some of our bees. Dear Property Owner, We are a local beekeeping business and are looking for hosts for our bees. We are a family-owned business based in Springfield. Please visit… Continue reading Dear Property Owner…

It’s been a rollercoaster watching the weather these past couple weeks. I know we live in the Midwest, but c’mon! Regardless, we’ve started grafting for our spring queens and there may have been some bees in our basement to weather the cold, cold nights. We have overwintered nucs available in our shop right now and… Continue reading Spring!

We get asked a lot if we sell at the farmer’s market, a road side stand or from our home. The answer is “not quite”. We do sell in bulk to other, locally retailing beekeepers. It’s a trade that allows all of us local producers to keep our customers in locally produced honey consumers can… Continue reading Where’s the honey?

The days are finally getting longer. We have been busy planning for this season and setting up the online shop. We have also been enjoying some quality time together making protein food (patties) for the bees. We are seeing strong and healthy hives which is always a joy. Hopefully we will be getting to editing… Continue reading Spring is coming

You may have seen that we have nucs for sale this year. Turns out, we will also have queens! We are getting two VSH-Breeder Queens, one Carniolan x Caucasian (crossbreed) and one Italian this spring and will have our very own first-generation local genetics and VSH crosses available starting late April. Still working on how… Continue reading Queen Bees

Andy wrote this for Prairie State Beekeeepers – our home club. Packages   – are made with bees shaken from brood frames of colonies into a cage for transport.    Are they nurse bees?  2lbs vs 3lbs – basically you ensure you have more nurse bees… or do you?  It all depends on who does the shaking’.  Each package comes with a… Continue reading A guide to packages and nucs

We had a lovely holiday season and got to spend lots of family time. It’s back to work now – planning for the year. We are inventorying equipment and plotting our course. This year, we intend to expand our apiaries, produce ample honey for sale, and make some comb honey. We are also looking at… Continue reading New Year

We are at the last days of fall and just finished the last feedings with heavy syrup. If all goes according to plan, the bees are using these to shore up their larder and have plenty of food to get them through winter. Meanwhile, we are shifting gears to our winter projects – planning for… Continue reading Winter time

We are helping our bees get the most out of the last days of fall forage by feeding them light sugar syrup. We’ve had some help these last few times getting the sugar ready and filling the buckets at the bee yard.

Our hives are starting to smell like socks which means the Goldenrod flow has started. Goldenrod honey has a stronger flavor than our regular summer honey and is usually more of an amber hue. This year we won’t be harvesting any Goldenrod honey since we just spun out honey and want our hives to go… Continue reading Goldenrod

We were blessed to spend some quality time visiting relatives in the old country… Es war sehr schön! We even found a bee supply store and bought a bunch of cool gadgets like numbered queen disks for next year’s queen rearing adventure!

We’ve been busy spinning not our wheels but rather our honey frames to extract honey. When we went to check on the bees, even our packages installed this spring had been busy and we got a nice little bumper crop of pale aromatic spring honey. We already sent some off with our friends to make… Continue reading Spinning out

We have been asked about queen bees. Yes, we have successfully grafted queens before and fully intend to get back to that next season. This year we just have had time constraints that didn’t allow for it. We may be making some queens for our own use, but are not set up to make any… Continue reading Queen Bees

We are so excited to see that we have some honey on packages installed this spring. We haven’t gotten to all the apiaries yet, but our Jerome bees certainly took advantage of the excellent forage around. It looks like we will have to do some extracting soon to prevent hives getting honey bound. Honey bound… Continue reading There is honey!

We are currently busy with looking for a home for our operation to be able to go and make the beer, the honey and the mead. So, if you know of someone with a place to sell or lease out that has or can be brought up to health code for food processing, let us… Continue reading We need a home!

We are building up our hives this spring and are hoping for a bumper crop in the fall. Meanwhile, we are out of honey!

We are finally getting back online after getting hacked in March, wiping out our site. We are still adding content, so please be patient! Thank you for visiting!