Monday, June 2, 2014

first beehive





The opening chapters in Novella Carpenter's book "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer" she describes a delivery of honey bees to her door step.  I was charmed at the idea of a box of bees being delivered to my doorstep. Was it safe? What did the box look like? How many are in a box? How do you get them out? That same year my neighbor started her hives and gave us a mason jar of honey for Christmas. So when the second grade class at our school donated a brand-new hand painted hive for auction san bees, we bid and won the hive boxes. I took a few classes, ordered my bees and some additional equipment and early May our bees arrived. I did not have them delivered to my house though. I went to Ballard Bee Company and picked up my screened box containing 10,000 Italian bees and one queen inside. From there we brought them home and released them into their new hive boxes. They've been in their box a month and they have had their first round of bee babies hatch and the hive is noticeably bigger in size. Too busy building comb and feeding their brood there isn't any honey being stored. Actually I am not expecting much honey this year, just a fun year of learning so that next year we can add to our numbers.

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