The Bees

Maggie first got the idea of keeping bees three years ago and got me hooked too. So in the winter of 2008 we built enough frames and deep hive bodies for two hives (the main components of a hive) bought from Betterbee, and studied for the arrival of the Italian 3 lb packages ordered from Walter T. Kelly Co. in the spring. This picture was taken right after Hurricane Irene which came through Southern Maryland on Saturday, and knocked out our electricity for 36 hours. The longest we had ever had our electricity go out before was an hour.


This picture was taken in the second year of our journey; as you can see, the North and South hives just barely survived being hit by a young poplar (if you look close enough you can see the straps holding the hives down). This same hurricane also brought down over 25 trees across our mile long drive way!

The first year we had four bad queens back to back and ended up combining the two hives, with two splits from our friend and mentor. The bees, along with their boost of help, survived a very cold winter and came out strong enough to produce 70 lbs of prime water white honey shown above.

Well, like I said, I was hooked and so I also ordered a package and a complete hive from Walter T. Kelly Co... And started building a foundationless eleven frame hive so that the bees would have the most natural and organic hive possible. The best sites for foundationless, natural, small cell, and chemical free beekeeping came from Bushfarms.com, Beenatural.wordpress.com, Beesource.com, and Scientificbeekeeping.com. These men have brought an old and healthy way of dealing with pests and diseases back to life. Well, my bees did OK the first year considering that they also had queen problems. Because of the queen problems, my bees had to overwinter in one deep hive body, something that is not done very much in my area. Our mentor talks about overwintering a hive in a single shallow (which is way smaller than a deep) on top of another strong hive and a screened division board in between the two colonies.

Last year we had a good year for a honey harvest considering that other beeks (some beekeeping lingo here) in the country reported moderate to poor honey harvest. Although we got more honey, it was much darker than last years. This year is going very well since the mild winter has allowed our North hive to get a good head start on the honey flow. The locus trees are blooming and my new package has somewhere between 3-5 foundationless combs already drawn! My original hive is queenless but we ordered a replacement.