Thursday, February 14, 2013

New hope for the coming spring!!

We are gearing up again with high hopes for a fantastic summer.  We have secured a new location for our bees near fields of irrigated alfalfa and abundant sweet clover.  We are anticipating a harvest over 100 gallons for 2013!!

I am currently working on a deal to purchase several hives leaving the almonds.  My plan is to make splits and have some nucs available about mid to late April, so if you are interested drop me an email.  We will have a limited quantity as I want to keep most for myself and build back our inventory after such a dismal summer last year.  If all goes well, I will be purchasing my queens from Steve Taber @ Honey Bee Genetics, I really like his bees, especially his Russians.  Last spring was such a bust trying to get queens from Russell Apiaries, don't think I will ever use them again.

Anyway, I am such a terrible photo taker, I always hope to fill this blog with lots of photos, but then the opportunity passes and I never even got my camera out.......Sorry!

Rough Summer

This was a rough summer for beekeepers throughout the intermountain west.  Cold spring and drought conditions made for a very poor crop. 



We were able to put together about 25 nucs that we distributed to people all over Montana, but most went to people right here in Billings. 

I started my bees out in Fly Creek which is close to Hardin, MT.  The ranch there raises only dry farm alfalfa and with the drought, there was very little for my bees to eat.  The hives were building up nice and then we had about a two week cold snap and the bees could not fly.  They were raising tons of brood and since they could not forage in the cold and had very little honey storage, I lost several hives!!

Because of the drought, I moved my bees home about the middle of July and it was just in the nick of time!!  None of the hives had any surplus honey in them. 

Our honey harvest was minimul this year and our hive inventory was reduced to 9 hives because of the poor conditions.





Monday, November 12, 2012

Cut out in Red Lodge

I started the season early this year with a cut out in May at a summer home in Red Lodge.  I was told it was a cabin, and boy was it a nice cabin.  The bees were in the chimney and I had to use a very large extension ladder just to reach the top.




The home owner wanted the bees out, so my main priority was to remove the bees, but we also did our best to find the queen and mover her into a new hive.



It was a two day process, thank goodness I had great help!!






Monday, May 28, 2012

Honey harvest of 2011

Starting in the spring of 2011 we bought two packages from Taber Bees.  These were Russian queens and I was very impressed.  We were able to harvest at least one super of honey from each one of these Russian hives.  Counting all our swarms and purchased hives we ended the summer with about 15 hives.





We decided to spend the money and bought a Maxant 3100p to harvest with.  I was very pleased, sure glad  we did not have to spin all that honey by hand.



swarms

I have been actively seeking honey bee swarms now for the past two summers.  I'm not very good about taking photos of what I do but here are a few photos of what I have.






Oregon bees

The first time we purchased bees was in Oregon in 2009.  We put them in our apple orchard and really enjoyed watching them grow.








We got this package from a local beekeeper.  I was really greatfull to get the bees this late in the spring, but the queen never really took off.  I was new so I never really realized what was wrong.  Eventually I purchased a new queen, but being naive I released her into the hive the same day I removed the old queen.  The bees balled and killed her. Luckily I never killed the old one and reintroduced her into the hive.  All in all, they never even filled one hive body all summer and then we moved to Montana

I took the hive to my folks place in Idaho and left them over winter.  They never made it.  So I started the next summer with two packages from Rossman Apiaries.


Starting over again in Montana

I added a couple of videos, but it does not look like they will work......








Here we are adding some more honey supers to our first apiary site just south of Laurel, Montana.






It was all a learning experience for us and we made a few mistakes as we went.  The best part was the first year we were able to harvest some honey......