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!!

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......

BEES 101

So here I go. 

 I have always wanted to get into raising bees, so  a few summers ago I purchased a couple of bee packages out of Georgia.  After reading every book I could find on the subject, I jumped right into it.