The Bees' Page
We started keeping bees last year. Holly took a local beekeeping course and got the bug. Literally!

Here, Holly pulls one of the 9 frames from a super to check on the bees. We open the hive up about once a week to monitor honey production, bee health and just to watch these fascinating creatures go about their work day. A couple of puffs of smoke, and they pretty much ignore us. In fact, that is a fly on her sleeve in the picture.
This frame is bulging with pure honey. The white cells have been capped. The bees build the comb out at a very slight angle so that the honey won't drip out.

This year has been an unusually good year for honey production.

We lucked out!
It's fun to watch the bees returning from the fields. Some days they clumsily fly back to the hive overloaded with such large pollen pellets on their back legs that you can see from about 15 feet away what color flowers they have been visiting.
Imagine our surprise the day that Holly found a swarm of our bees hanging from a tree above the beehives. Swarms are usually pretty easy to capture but when they establish a hive in a branch 15 feet above the ground with comb built around vines and branches it starts to complicate matters.
This image would make an excellent cautionary sticker to place on ladders with a warning: NEVER USE IN THIS MANNER As I smoked the bees I remember thinking that stamp collecting was maybe not such bad hobby to take up.
We had some excitement right after Holly took these pictures. My plan was to cut the comb from the surrounding limbs leaving a branch handle coming out of the side by which to gently carry the whole swarm down to it's new home, a nice new wooden hive body which Holly was preparing below. I had placed a 5 gallon bucket on the ladder's paint stand (that little shelf with the warning that it isn't a step) intending to hang it under the hive with the wire handle over the branch to help support the weight so I could make the last cut. Well, as I was trimming away bits of vine and twigs the whole hive suddenly broke free and fell. The comb and bees crashed down 5 feet, directly into the bucket which then flipped over and fell another 5 feet hitting the top of the truck and then bouncing did a nice 360 as it fell the final 5 feet to the ground, landing right side up by the driver's side door. I can tell you that at this point the bees were agitated. You really never appreciate just how many thousands of bees there are in a hive until they are airborne looking for the person in charge of beekeeping. We did finally manage to get them settled back in to their hive and gave them a gallon of sugar water to try to keep them from straying again.
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