The life, death, and hopeful resurgence of a first year beekeeper's hive

Bees are by far the most difficult animal I have ever kept. They make everything else we have here seem like child's play. They are the only creature I have ever taken a class about and still feel clueless.

I realize the title to this post is kind of bleak, but I really hope things are on the upswing!

I'm sure we all remember my post in April when I got the bees. I was so excited! And even though everyone in our bee class said we wouldn't get honey this year, I was going to prove them wrong! LOL, no, Ellen!



We had a rocky start when a couple months ago my hive got robbed by another hive of bees. This was a Game of Thrones-esque battle between my bees, with their stores of honey and some crazy lady who goes out and feeds them sugar syrup at least once a week (me!), and the invading bees, who were probably from a weaker hive and wanted all the riches we had to offer. There were piles of dead bees everywhere, it was horrible, but my hive seemed to win the battle and survive-or so I thought.

Inspecting the hive shortly after the robbing showed that I didn't have a terribly huge number of bees, but everything else looked normal. We a good brood pattern, which is just the patten of how the queen lays her eggs. We had eggs, larvae and capped brood, which meant that even though I didn't see the queen, I had one and she was laying well. It looked like a hive on the upswing.

But, no.

In the the inspection of the hive just 3 weeks later, the number of bees had dropped drastically. Where there had been thousands, now there were hundreds. The brood patter was spotty, if there was any. There were dead larvae and no eggs. And it was just empty. Frames that had been full of eggs, brood, and bees were just completely empty.



My fear is/was the dreaded colony collapse disorder. Pretty much the worst thing to happen to bees in the past few years. And I still don't know that is what happened. Our beekeeping instructor will be out here in a week to help us get our hives ready for the winter, so hopefully I'll know more then.

But I said this was hopeful!

This brings us to last night. Our friend Renee had a bee hive in the roof of a house that needed some construction work done. Our plan was to lure the hive into a new hive and the plan was pretty much working, and I was crazy excited to get these bees! But of course, the construction got moved up a month and there was no time for the lure, they needed to be out yesterday. Great. And they are all the way up there:



Let's be honest, Craig, Renee's husband did the vast majority of the work. I freaked out a bit, then calmed down enough to be actually useful. I had to take these girls home and figure out what to do with them.



This morning I was out at 6 to start this project. According the University of YouTube, I was supposed to cut the comb with brood/eggs/bees from the hive we just moved so it fit into empty frames and so I did. It was so early that the bees were pretty chill. I just cut sections that looked salvageable, swept piles of huddled together bees that were on the lips of the box onto the frame, put them in the nuc box that my orginal bees came in. I searched for the queen bee in these big piles of sleepy bees, but never found her.



I took this full box of bees and all and put them all in my dwindling hive. I'm really not sure if I was supposed to do this, if this will start another Game of Thrones battle between the few bees in the hive and the ones I just put in there, I have no idea, I just hope some survive!



I'm just really glad Keith works til 7 today and that he's so busy for the next week that he probably won't need to use the pickup or go behind the greenhouse. I didn't get all the bees from all the boxes they were moved into my hive and there are so many bees in the back of the pickup, but I'll probably try to move them this evening. But it kind of feels like they're everywhere back there!.

Hopefully they stay, survive the winter, become a good hive for me next year. If not, no big deal I guess! I only got stung once in this whole process and that was only because it was dark and I didn't see a bee on the gloves I was putting on.

Until next time!

Spring: bees and lambs!

This is our third year lambing and just like the past years, nothing went as expected.

Ginger, Coco, Lulu. That was the order I thought the girls would go and I only got the first one right. Ginger had her babies on the exact day we expected them-right on time! She needed a little help with her first lamb, but she took care of the second one on her own. And what cute twins!




Then we had to wait a solid seven days for the next lamb. It wasn't giant Coco, but little Lulu. Keith was home for this one and we helped little Lulu deliver her one big boy lamb. Lu dotes on her one cutie.




8 long days passed while we waited for Coco to finally lamb. A friend who raises sheep stopped by and was certain that Coco was carrying triplets, but with Coco being so huge, how could you tell?! Well she was right and we slept right through it. At least I have an excuse called a terrible cold combined with codeine cough syrup. I'm guessing she lambed around 3am and just popped out 3 little black and white lambs. You are amazing, Coco!



This brings our lamb total to 6, with 5 boys and 1 girl, which is weird. Of course this is the year we hoped to keep a girl from Lulu, but only Coco had a girl. We are also hoping to keep a girl from Cupid, but who knows what is going to happen. We still have Margo and Cupid left to have babies and that should be this weekend, so we should find out soon.



And while we're doing all of our normal lambing/kidding stuff, it is also time to add bees! Keith surprised me with a Flow Hive this Christmas. A friend and I are taking a class through Oregon State University Extension office, where we are getting hands on bee experience along with nucs to set up our own hives. We got our nucs on Sunday night and I set them up in our hive on Monday.



Like any other animal, you have to feed and water the bees. The green box on top of the brood box is full of sugar water to feed the bees until spring finally kicks into gear here. Just about everyone in our class told us not to expect honey this year, and really I have no idea why. My plan is to feed and water the bees, but the Flow super on in a few weeks and hope for the best. I guess only time will tell!

When Margo and Cupid finally lamb/kid, it will be back to milking for me and I can't wait! Until then, enjoy the sunshine!