Da Bees

Honey Bee on a Nasturtium flower

This is our second year with Honey Bees. We have 2 hives at New Farm. Last year we had a rough winter and we lost both hives. We re-established them this year. One hive comes from a “package” of 3000 bees and a fertilized queen from Georgia that we poured into an empty hive body. The other hive we established with a “nuc” or a nuclear hive of 5 frames from a beekeeper here in Connecticut. A nuc has a queen, brood, workers and food. We transferred the nuc frames to our hive and add more frames. We gave them a kick start feeding of 2:1 sugar water and some essential oils. Each hive should have about 10,000 bees when mature. We will see which hive does better. We learned a lot last year…mostly from our mistakes and hopefully that will pay off this year.

Above - One of our hives

Left - A frame in a hive body

The bees arrived in early May and now they have drawn out about a dozen frames of the 20 frames in the two hive bodies that make up each hive. We hope they will draw out and fill all 20 frames with brood, honey and pollen before the fall nectar flow. We would then put on a queen excluder and “supers”. The workers would add honey to the supers but the queen could add no eggs to these frames. The supers would be where we would get our honey.

Inspecting a frame for brood

There is no doubt that we have seen a difference in the way our crops produce since we have had the bees…more cucumbers, squash, tomatillos…more everything. Better pollination means more flowers produce fruit. Right now there are a lot of plants in blossom in and around New Farm, and between the Honey Bees, the various Bumble Bees and other pollinators the garden is buzzing.
A Honey Bee and a Bumble Bee jockey for position on a squash blossom

We’ll keep you posted on their progress and especially if we get a chance to extract some honey for us.
The smoker is used to calm the bees when working the hives in our apiary.