We took a little after-dinner walk as a family last night, and
discovered that we look at flowers differently now that we raise bees. We used to just look for pretty flowers along
the road. Now we look for flowers that
will make tasty and plentiful sources of nectar for our littlest
livestock. But all the nectar-rich
flowers in the world don’t mean anything if we don’t have a bunch of worker
bees out there collecting. So the past
month or so, we’ve been repopulating our hives - our "Littlest Livestock."
We’d sacrificed six of our colonies last fall so that the other four had
enough food to make it through the winter.
It almost worked - three colonies survived. And thanks to the mild winter, we didn’t have
to give them any supplementary sugar water like we did last year – their stores
of honey saw them through.
 |
| Our new queens, in their little "Bee Kennels" |
This spring, we bought four “bee packages” to start building
back the six empty hives – each package contained three pounds of bees, mostly
worker bees (they’re the ones with the little hardhats) & nurse bees
(wearing comfortable shoes, of course), with one queen and a couple of drones
thrown in to get the party started. We had
been hoping to split the three colonies that survived the winter to populate
three additional hives and save on bee replacement costs, but they were weak
with poor queens. So we decided to
replace all 3 queens. We brought in younger,
more productive queens who would lay more eggs to build the colonies back
faster. Thank goodness the queens can’t
sue us for age discrimination!
