sugar water – 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!