beeyard – Twin Bears MapleWorks

It’s been a while!🐝🐝

Hey all! Sorry we have been missing in action. We have been busy bees and enjoying our first summer as Vermonters!

We added a girl to Twin Bears Maple Works. Say hello to Lucy!

Momma Bear went back to school and Papa Bear celebrated a birthday! Memeré and Peperé visited from Florida. We treated the hives for mites. Luckily the weather cooperated and the treatment went well. I will do a follow up post explaining why we treat and the issues mites can cause.

‘This was taken at our last bee class in June. Look at the pollen this bee is carrying!

So hard to get a good picture these days!

Yay! We can walk around the beeyard again!

I finally weed wacked the bee-yard (jungle) and noticed one hive was running out of room. This past Saturday Grandpa and I added an addition onto the hives. This third hive box is an important one. This is the box that will get the bees through winter for the most part. It should have at least 50 pounds approximately of honey for them to survive. Along with us feeding them hopefully we will overwinter these bees and be able to extract some delicious honey next summer! You will notice in the photo with the taller hives there is a 4th box. This is a feeder box. My father and law and I decided we should be cautious and feed the bees to hopefully deter swarming. (Swarming is when there are too many bees in a hive and half decide to move out and they form a new queen.)

Our next thing to worry about is robbing. The next few weeks is when other honey bees, hornets, you name it rob hives. I will tell you how we deter this in the follow up post along with why we treat for mites.

Thank you for reading! We hope you are enjoying your summer! ☀️

We have happy buzzing bees!🐝🐝

The NUC installs went extremely smooth! In the video below the sound you hear is what happy bees sound like.

I am so relieved we didn’t have any Mariah caBEE moments this afternoon!! We were able to spot BEEonce the Queen bee in the right hive. She was about 2.5 times the size of all of the other bees. We didn’t spot It’s Britany BEEch but we know she is there since the bees are working. There is no standard NUC bee count size but everything on the internet estimates there are approx 9k-10.4k bees in a NUC. In roughly one month time they should each increase to over 18k bees. That’s a lot of bees friends!

The bees started building comb in the open spaces of the NUCS. How cool is that?🐝

Have a safe and happy Memorial Day Weekend!

Tiffany

***5:20pm update*** They are slowly still filtering into their hives and happy.

***8:15pm update***

Goodnight Bees!!🐝

NUC’s are here and it was dramatic!

This bee experience has been full of weird drama. The NUC’s came in cardboard closed boxes. The key word here is closed…

When I got home and opened the back of my car one NUC top was propped slightly open. (Only in my life right?!?) There were a good amount of bees outside having a party. The crazy thing is only two bees joined me upfront on my ride home. These bees are a family, they stick together.

I decided the safest bet was to suit up to bring them to the bee-yard. It is important that you know where the front and the back of the NUC is. This helps the bees orientate to their new surroundings. The boxes are closed now (Phewf!!) but tomorrow the frames will be installed in the same direction and same order. Here is a video of them buzzing inside the NUC’s and the bee-yard in the dark. 🐝

https://videos.files.wordpress.com/ulkcXKYt/img_7940.mov

Stay tuned for the update tomorrow afternoon!!

We hope you had a less dramatic evening!,

Tiffany

T-2 days until the Bees are here!

Sugar water made and hives are all set up! We are getting very excited for Friday! 🐝🐝

Happy Cinco De Bee-O! 🐝

It was a busy day at Twin Bears Maple Works!

Eric sanitized the evaporator in the sugar shack and set up the bee yard. Electric fence and all…You are not getting our bees Justin timBEARlake!! 🐻

Thank god we could put the twins to work!! (Just kidding. They loved running around with Grandpa & Bentley. They also enjoyed the wheel barrows Mem & Pep sent!)

The Beeyard all laid out

Fence wire up, mulched & cinderblocks for hive stands.

Another angle to show the gate opening. All that’s left is to hook up the fence energizer!