Well, first the obligatory picture of the kitten! She's why I don't get as much done! About the time I'm ready to get up and go do something "real", she settles in on my legs for a nap!
We went to Whitefish to visit Rod and Vonda. These are a pair of "snow shoes" Rod made while on a winter camping adventure in canada.
Our purpose in visiting them was to see their bee-keeping set-up. We've been tossing around the idea of getting hives and honey bees, now that we have so many fruit trees, berry bushes, and garden stuff needing pollinating! Plus the honey would be delicious! Rod built his own hives, a horizontal hive.
Those strips of board across the one with the "lid"/roof lifted off, are what the bees build the combs down from. When the time comes, you can lift one up and out of the hive to remove the honey. He built this one today and no bees were living in it yet. He has five hives now. When they "swarm" he captures them and gets them settled in one of the new, empty hives. This is the only empty one right now, so he's ready when he has a swarm. A swarm is when the queen gets a new queen growing, then takes a bunch of the worker bees and takes off to find a new place to live.
One of the hives has a little glass window for viewing, which he normally keeps covered with the plug of wood he cut out when he made the window hole, because the bees like it dark. The vertical strips are the combs hanging down from the wooden strips across the top. They fill the little capsules in the comb with honey and seal them with wax, which they make.
Sometime this summer we're going to build a couple and have them ready. If you buy the bees commercially they ship them in the spring.
We went to Whitefish to visit Rod and Vonda. These are a pair of "snow shoes" Rod made while on a winter camping adventure in canada.
Our purpose in visiting them was to see their bee-keeping set-up. We've been tossing around the idea of getting hives and honey bees, now that we have so many fruit trees, berry bushes, and garden stuff needing pollinating! Plus the honey would be delicious! Rod built his own hives, a horizontal hive.
Those strips of board across the one with the "lid"/roof lifted off, are what the bees build the combs down from. When the time comes, you can lift one up and out of the hive to remove the honey. He built this one today and no bees were living in it yet. He has five hives now. When they "swarm" he captures them and gets them settled in one of the new, empty hives. This is the only empty one right now, so he's ready when he has a swarm. A swarm is when the queen gets a new queen growing, then takes a bunch of the worker bees and takes off to find a new place to live.
One of the hives has a little glass window for viewing, which he normally keeps covered with the plug of wood he cut out when he made the window hole, because the bees like it dark. The vertical strips are the combs hanging down from the wooden strips across the top. They fill the little capsules in the comb with honey and seal them with wax, which they make.
Sometime this summer we're going to build a couple and have them ready. If you buy the bees commercially they ship them in the spring.
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