Attack of the bees

I went out to visit my hives this week and it was an adventure for sure! Right as I drove up to where the hives are at I got attacked by about 5 bees, I was still about 30 to 40 feet away from the hives and not even out of the truck yet. The bees were ramming into me all over my body, especially in my hair. It took me a while to get my veil and hood on without getting and bees stuck inside (that would be very bad).

These are my bees when I got there. very peaceful.

When I opened the hive on the right, I noticed that there was a lot of wax that the bees were building on the top of the frames. I had to scrape that off, I was in the wrong spot. The feeder (the black thing in the hive) was bone dry, so I filled it up again with sugar water. They must have been really hungry.

Here are a bunch of bees on a frame.

Busy as a bee

Now here is a cool picture. There is a lot going on here. Let me point out a few things.
1. There are bees all over :)
2. On the lower left of the picture there is capped honey, yummy.
3. There are a few bees with their heads down the comb feeding.
4. And probably the coolest thing about this picture is in the center where the there are no bees. If you zoom into this picture and you look in the center of those cells then you can see small white specs. Those are bee eggs.

Well my bees are doing so good that it was time to add a second brood box to the hives. That way they will have more room to move and grow.

Google Map Test

Here is an example of what I may bee looking at. This is all made up data (NOT REAL), I just did it for fun. I still need to get a good process down so it becomes more automated.

Hive KMZ (download this and open it in google earth)


View Larger Map

Creative Idea #1 - Bee Map

This begins my first segment of creative ideas for bees.

When I first got my bees and people found out that I am a beekeeper, one of the very first (if not most frequent) questions I get is: How far do bees travel to find flowers? Eventually I got the idea to make a map. For those of you who know me and what I do, you should know that that kind of thing is right down my ally. Well here is my map idea. I want to create a google based map that lets a user place a marker of where their hives are at. Also they will be able to input information like name, address, how many hives, contact info, type of queen, etc. Then I want to create a buffer zone around each point to show the distance that a bee will travel to find food. In the end I want a person to look at a map and zoom to their home and see if they are covered by bees nearby so they will know if they are going to have a great garden that year. I plan on getting it out to all my beekeeping friends because the more data the better the information will be.


Well it took me a while for the light bulb in my head to go off, but now that it has I plan on listing all my cool ideas here. please feel free to comment on them and help me figure out a way to do them.

Year 2

So this is my second year beekeeping and I decided to start a blog about it.

A little history: Last year I had one hive and it was in my backyard and the only help I had was to ask some questions at some beekeeper meeting and some books. It was fun, but my bees died. :(

So this year I received an email from someone that wanted to have some hives on their 25 acres, and best of all it was in my home town not to far from my house! I decided to have two hives this year and start from new packages.

Here are some pics of the first bee adventure this year. I hope that you will all follow how my bees are doing and cheer them on :)

I picked up the bees in this warehouse place. All the white specs you see are bees flying around.

This is a tall stack of packaged bees, each box contains about 3,000-5,000 bees

My dad came with me to see what all the buzz was about and took this video. See if you can notice the bees flying in front of the camera. We arrived later in the afternoon so many of the packages had already been picked up, but I assume this place was full of bees.

My brother and I taking my bees to the truck.

Don't they look so happy?

This is the field they are in.

I hope they do well in this area.


This is shortly after I placed the bees in the hive, right before I closed it up.


A bunch of bees are already hanging out on their new front porch


Here are my two hives with feeders on top and the cages in front (that is so if there are any stragglers out there then they can find there way home).

He is so happy to be outside.

My hives are next to someone else's. This could be good for me cause I may see them out there sometimes and they can mentor me in the ways of beekeeping.

This is what my bees see when they leave the hive. What a great view!