April Update

We have been busy since the bees got back from California about a month ago. The bees have been feed pollen patties and also corn syrup to get them to grow faster. We are trying to up our bee population so that we can fill all of our nucs, 1/2 size hives, to up our number of working hives. Right now we have about 40 regular size hives and 20+ nucs. We were able to get 2 nucs out of each regular hive, or about that. We still have a few hives to split, but most are done. Here is a photo of Addie helping Bryant make pollen patties for the bees.
We also got 12 new queens in the mail this week. 10 of them are regular queens and 2 of them are artificially inseminated queens used for breeding more queens. We have also been grafting queens of our own. We did one graft right before the bees got back from California, but the weather wasn't quite warm enough yet and so not many of that graft took. We just did another graft this weekend of about 27 and we will have to wait and see how many of those take. Bryant is getting another hive ready to graft from and we will probably be doing more grafts this week.

Bees are home sooner.

The bees are back home thanks to a night with no sleep and a really cool dolly that Bryant's Brother made for moving bees around with. The bees made their trip back from California on Wednesday or Thursday of last week. Our beekeeper friend has some bee yards in Mesquite and his bees got placed there so ours did as well. We started for Mesquite at 4:00 pm and left Mesquite with a load of bees at 1:30 am. We had to move the bees off of the pollinating pallets that holds four hives to individual bottom boards, there were 38 hives. The kids went with us and had fun watching movies in the Excursion, including Bee Movie (pretty appropriate), and then had a sleepover in the Excursion. Poor kids, they sure are good sports with their crazy mom and dad. We decided that we better just drive around and place bees when we got back to Kanab, because it was almost daylight and the bees would be flying soon. So we placed bees in 5 of our bee yards. They are all VERY heavy. Bryant's brother is starting up bees too and both of the guys had seen these dollys that you can use to wheel bees around with and so Matt made one, because holy cow they cost a lot, and it works FABULOUS! We got back to our house at 10 am Sunday morning. Got the kids ready for church and went to Church. Bryant stayed home because he worked harder than me. I fell asleep at 3 after fixing my family a wonderful Sunday dinner of hotdogs and mac and cheese, what a slacker I am, and didn't even move for 3 hours after finally laying down. We have come to find out that sometimes the bees just require that you pull an all nighter. It went pretty good. Bryant got stung way too many times to count. There was something wrong with his veil, we soon got it figured out, but not before his neck became a pin cushion. He was a little swollen Sunday. Poor guy. I only got stung twice. Such a different story from the last time we moved bees like this. I didn't have a full body suit last time, love the full body suit! Mesquite was beautiful with all of the wild flowers in bloom. Who would have thought Mesquite had it in itself to do that?? It really would be a great place to keep the bees when it is blooming the way that it was, but a heck of a drive to work bees.

March Update

The bees are now back from California and are waiting in a yard in Mesquite Nevada for us to pick them up. We might just leave them there for a while since Mesquite will be blooming for a while and give them some good feed. Bryant will probably get a couple of hives to use for grafting queens out of. Our first set of queens were grafted on Sunday the 23rd. So far it looks like a few of them have taken. We will know for sure on the number in about 11-14 days from Sunday. Our goal is to graft a bunch of new queens for ourselves and then also a bunch to sell in the fall.

We have been busy making new nuc boxes for the new queens. We are making 120 nuc boxes. They are all about put together. Then we just need to make lids for all of them and then paint them all. We are also making tons of frames. There are a lot of frames completed, but we still need to put the foundation in them. We seem to work better under a nearing deadline and so we should be able to get things done quickly now.

Pollination time...

We are now getting ready to ship bees to California for pollination. We were up to about 57 hives at the end of summer, but needed to combine some of the smaller hives and get the struggling hives strong. So now we are sitting at 36 really good hives. We will be sending them all to California with a beekeeper that lives in St George. We met Golden, with Golden Bee, by purchasing bees from him in the past. He is going to ship our bees with his and will in turn pay us a portion of what he makes with our bees. This is what we have been looking forward to doing ever since we started bees. Yahoo we have finally done it!