Your Buzz
Welcome to Your Buzz!
BeeWeaver Customer Corner.
Here you find the feedback and pictures you submit to us. We appreciate every thing you send and are happy to share with others.
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busy little bees    |
jeb532 Texas 23 days since hiving...7 frames filled out with honey, pollen and brood...only 2 drone cells in the bunch |
Swarming  |
Big Island Bee Hawaii Bunches of Bees on the Big Island of Hawaii... someone get some supers please! |
Backyard Beauty    |
Missouri Backyard Beekeeper Missouri Everybody has their own flair for showing off their hives. Here is one example of how a bee hive can turn into more then just a box with bugs. |
New Nuc     |
Father Daughter Beekeepers Texas A father and daughter hive their nuc together and have a shared first experience of beekeeping. |
Homemade Top Bar Hive |
Texas TBH Beekeeper Texas Texas Top Bar Hive |
| Miky's Hive |
Michael C. Arizona My post office called me at 6:30 am saying, "Can you please come pick up your bees?" I jumped in the car as fast as a quail running across the desert. At the post office the post lady carried out my bees not sure what to think followed by an entourage of other employees wanting to meet the guy that ordered bees. I could not wait to get home and get busy. For a first time beekeeper everything went perfect. I realized that the bees really know what to do without much help from me. Now I am sitting in my lawnchair loving the sound of that gentle hum as calming as buddist mantra. |
10 days after hiving...  |
jeb532 Texas I've got capped brood! |
Beautiful Apiary, Confused Bees |
Louisiana Beekeeper Louisiana New bees established in a beautiful apiary. Note the increased activity in the one hive. The bees (from packages) left their queens behind and joined up with the one hive (usually queen phermone is the cause). The preventive steps to keep this from happening include locking in the bees (you can use screen from packages) for 3-5 days with their feed, then giving them an opening big enough for 1 bee to go in and out. The solution is to check for live queens in the mostly empty hives and to move frames of bees back into those hives and then do the preventive step of locking them in. |
A Queen's Hard Life  |
Austin Queen Texas This Spring 2010 Queen did a great job but she was damaged somehow. It isn't always easy being the queen! Smashed abdomen, missing legs, chewed wing... Replacing her is the best option |
| Defeating Skunks |
jeb532 Texas Here's a tip from local beekeeper David Sharp. David is 86 and still keeping 43 hives! According to David, skunks will fan their tail in front of a low-mounted or ground-mounted hive and let it load up with bees...them calmly walk off and have a bee feast. If you mount your beehives at least 14" from the ground to the base, the skunk has to stand on its hind legs to reach the bees...exposing the skunks thinly furred and vulnerable stomach area to attack, allwoing the bees to drive him off. |
Here's the queen!   |
jeb532 Texas Here's the queen! Drawing out comb nicely! Look at the size of that drone! |
| I dood it |
jeb532 Texas Well, at 63 years young I decided to finally walk in my grandfather's footsteps. He's been gone almost 40 years, so this beekeeping endeaver is a real brain strainer trying to remember anything he told me about bees. Thankfully the internet is a weath of information. I've downloaded beekeeping books from www.archive.org that are up to 150 years old...i.e. long before major pesticide use. PET PEEVE! - anybody that claims they can't get an education when there are librairies and free internet at everyone's fingertips has got to be just plain lazy! SHEESH! Got my first 3lb package yesterday morning. The post office help was glad I came early! I think it might have been a first time for them too. Had to wait till ~1pm to hive them (wind and low temps). Couldn't have been easier...and my neighbor who came to observe was definitley bitten by the beekeeping bug. The fabric strap on the queen cage was super handy...allowed me to simply staple the strap to a frame. Really pretty bees...most with a cordovan coloring. Gentle too...although I have to admit to being suited up for the hiving (cluuuck...cluck,cluck). Didn't need to use any smoke. Gotta remember next time to cover up the sugar syrup can after pouring it into the feeder. The entire can was full of bees before I could turn around. Must have taken me 15 minutes to shake them all out. Boy, was there a lot of communal grooming going on after that! There was one drone in the bunch and he was twice the size of the workers. By about 5 pm the ladies were already brining in pollen! It probably helps that I'm fortunate enough to have my hive surrounded by ~2 acres of bluebonnets. I'll send pics in a few days...my PC was killed yesterday by a virus hitchhiking on IE....arrrggghhh! |
Laying Workers or a Drone Layer  |
BeeWeaver Texas Hives can go queenless for many reason, but one of the most common outcomes of a longtime queenless hive is laying workers. Laying workers = drone brood, and no worker brood. A damaged queen or queen not mated will also produce drone brood only. These images are from a package of bees in which the queen died and it was not discovered before some of the workers decided to be the queens. |
Little Beekeeper |
BeeWeaver Texas Little Stone... he was 3 years old when my friend (and BeeWeaver manager), Susan, dressed him up in bee-ware. This lil' drone is growing up fast. He is nearly 6 now and loves the bees. |
Bee Training |
New Ulm Beekeeper Texas I kept my orange trees in the arboretum behind the house and they are all blooming. I leave the door open and put a container with some honey inside the arboretum and it took less then one hr. and a 1000 bees found the honey. Now they remember and some come every day. |
| Maryland Experiment |
ROY C SMALL Maryland I am going to try Bill Rawleigh's Gardener's Hive this year instead of the traditional Langstroth hive body. My wife, however, is a strict traditionalist, so she is going with the Langstroth. Has anyone out there tried the Gardener's Hive, and, if so, what luck did you have? I am primarily interested in pollination. I will add more hives and go for honey production next year. |
| BeeWeaver Grit |
Ohio Beekeeper Ohio FYI. I can attest to the hardiness of your bee-line. I have tested 8 genetic lines of bees over the last 7 years in our location of northern Ohio. I came into stewardship of some of your buckfast hybrid bees about 5 years ago (what i suspect may have been some of your bee weaver early - progenitors). I do not chemically treat, as i have been seeking a bee that is naturally cold-hardy and mite tolerant and while this has been an expensive, learning proposition, your bees win hands down. They are slightly more aggressive, but i strongly believe that this is a trait to be desired for survival. Too much has been lost by selection of bees (particularly the Italian line) that are extremely docile and has led to what we believe are weak and unstable genetics without immunity or hardiness. I have been a local proponent of your bees and encourage keeper tolerance for a trait that bees should have - they have stingers for a reason - to protect the sweet gold we have come to love so dearly !! After consulting with some expert entomologists several years ago we ran some tests for RFLP fragments across several bee lines and found differences between your buckfast hybrids and the others. We would love to continue our studies with your bee weaver line in the future. The hive i came into possession of is now entering its 6th year without fail and swarms every spring (with secret hopes of encouraging repopulation in the wild) Thank you BeeWeaver !!! |
| a beezie day in the bee yard |
mdm106 Texas |
Snow Bees |
Susan Dunsmore (BeeWeaver Manager) Alaska Package bees arrive in Alaska in April, about 2 months before the snow melts and 3 months before there is any nectar flow. When they arrive I have to dig out a small area in which to hive them. It was about 20 degrees when I hived these 25 packages. They'll be fine. The trick for hiving in cold temperatures is to have everything set up and in place before you bring the bees out of the house. Note the fence that I will string electric wire from since both black bears and grizzlies live in the neighborhood. Once the snow melts I will be able to move them further apart but digging down through 3 feet of compacted snow is hard! |
HilltopBees    |
Andrew Burnard Texas Kenya Toy bar hive doing very well. |
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