Some cool articles... Blue Honey and Red Honey, Whoops!

Red Honey

Blue Honey article

Sharing the Bee Love...

What a fun afternoon!  We had a young guest today who is being homeschooled... her lesson today was about bees!  B is such a good teacher and it was such a pleasure to have such an interested and animated student! Please scroll through til the end, we have some fun videos...

Teaching her to build some frames.  The one she add to the hive will be hers at the end of the season!!

Happy Student!

Our intrepid Apiarists... off on an adventure to add frames and check out the general health of the hives!

Despite the bug netting being hot and annoying, this little girl was VERY patient and happy.

The bees are doing very well, plenty of brood, honey, pollen - all the good stuff.

This little girl has NO FEAR!

B is having fun sharing his knowledge of all things Bee.  He's becoming quite the expert.  

Interesting use for Bees... Elephant blockers!

Interesting article:    Bee hive fences keep African Elephants away from crops

Bees and Slow Motion

Playing with the slow motion setting on my iPhone and filmed the bees.  So much fun!!

OMG... I forgot this year's Naked Gardening Day shot... LOL

Oh B.  I love you.  And your booBEES....  bwa ha ha... or it more like a BEEkini??  

Don't forget, Naked Gardening Day, the 1st Saturday in May.  Live a little.  Or heck, a lot.

Bees are doing great

We did a quick check on the bees today... with the great weather, incredibly high pollen counts and nature just starting to explode everything...we wanted to make sure there were enough frames in there for growth.  We've been checking them about twice a week, this should go down to about once a week now that we don't have to worry about feeding them.

The NWC  hive always seems more active and is building at a faster rate than the other hive.  We even got to see a drone today while we were checking the hive.  I'm gonna call him Bob.  He's the kind of bigger, darker bee under B's thumb in this picture.

I was concerned that some of the combs seem to be growing together between the frames... apparently its because of some gaps between the frames.... but it doesn't seem to excessive at the moment.

Here is the completely empty feeder from the NWC hive.. .we added one more feeding just because and they went through it all pretty quickly.  The WQD hive, once again, didn't seem to pay their feeder much attention.  We took their feeder and left it on the ground for tonight, maybe the NWC's can get a quick snack.

Found one of the little girls on my Star of Bethlehems, just chilling on a leaf.  Other than the dandelions, these are the only other flowers in my backyard this time of year.

As usual, Evil Kitten was out with us while we were in the side yard.  His interest however seemed to be completely focused on a pair of chickadees that were playing around this Birch... LOL.

Close up of the bee on B's jacket.  I love all the detail, considering it was taken with an iPhone 5s.

Bee Hive check-in

Today we had our friend W drop by and check out the hives with us.  We're looking for brood and stores... the NWCs had more stores, but the WQDs were really working on making more brood.