Today was a day that I accomplished much. It was one of those days that I can be proud of and I am. I was feeling so awful in the morning it took me a while to get started, but before I knew it, I was fully committed to my tasks.
I had wanted to get the yard cut, kill the weeds and put honey supers on the bee hives.
When I came downstairs the kitchen was a mess so I cleaned that first.
Afterward, I went out side and got the lawnmower from the garden shed. I checked the gas and the oil and both were fine, and after priming I pulled the rope to crank it. It started right away but then it stopped. I pulled again, it started then stopped. I went through this several times when I realized I was getting no where. So I resigned myself to be being a woman and not knowing what to do with it, and being a woman who doesn't know what to do, does know to push it to the people who do.
Himself and the Rocket Scientist had it started again and running 10 minutes. We talked for a bit and I invited everyone to dinner, and left with my quest to finish my internal list.
It was wonderful the guys totally fixed it and I was able to get the grass cut rather quickly.
Billy decided it would be a good day to clean an area of the garage that he wants to use so he wasn't bothering me. Life was good.
Then I got my bottle of roundup and went around the property spraying along the walk and driveway it. In the process my neighbor and I found a huge bunch of poison ivy so I pulled out my handy dandy Brush Killer and took care of that.
It was after this chore that I walked past the beehive and decided I was going to deal with the girls. I was really calm, my chi was good so I put on my bonnet and lit the smoker. I pulled the tops off of the hive and it was really full the Queen had laid a lot of brood up in the honey boxes. I scraped off the wild comb, and inspected the hive to see if there were any sub-queen sacs that the girls may be raising and sure enough there were. So I took out the frames with the sub- queen sacs on them, and put them in my other hive box . I also took out a few frames of workers from the old hive and added them to the new to help build the colony. I really don't have anything to lose, since I lost last years colony from 'Colony Collapse Syndrome' so its worth a try and if she doesn't emerge with in a few day they will all go back to the old hive.
I added four empty honey boxes to the old hive. The two brood boxes and the one honey box were absolutely stuffed, and the colony was completely out of room.
To encourage them fill in the new comb. I placed the full honey box on the top and the empty honey boxes between them and my brood boxes.
It will be interesting to see how they do.
I am very optimistic regarding this years harvest as the bees looked so great. I did find mites on them so I will make up some sugar and crisco patties for them and see what happens... this is the only thing I can do for them at this point as if I put chemicals on them now the honey from the fourth of July flow wont be right as I don't want any chemicals in my honey. The instructions say that you can, I prefer to use the chemicals if I have to, during the winter so that we don't ingest the chemical that we are giving them.
Say a few prayers for the bees this year... they need our help to save them and if we don't we won't be here to notice.
Remember...every third bite that you eat comes from something that a bee pollenated.
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