Xmas 2019

The (second) year of the Bee

It took us long enough but we finally have honey from our beehive! This has been a 2 year process. If you’d like to see how we did in the first year, head on over to our Xmas 2018 review.

May 2019 – Getting our Hive

We still had our hive from last year which meant we had a great base of combs that a new colony could build from. We went back to the folks at Bridgetown Bees (thanks Glen!) and he got us a Nuc that took to our setup very nicely. Just a short trip home from NE Portland and we were back in business with bees!

June 2019 – Doing Just Fine

Now that we have the bees and a great hive for them, they took to it very nicely. They moved right in and cleaned up the existing combs and the place was immaculate in no time.

August 2019 – Growing so quickly!

We started with two boxes on our Warre hive but by August the bees were outgrowing it quickly. We had to engage in operation make-this-happen NOW to add another box. As with all things bee-related, its a plan for the worst and hope for the best. This went extremely easy and the bees didn’t even mind that we added the new box in there.

Here you can see the bees starting to wrap around the front of the hive. Not necessarily good.

Didn’t take us long to make the switch. Yes, we did it this quickly.

October 2019

As we got closer to the end of the year we had to think hard about when we were going to harvest. We wanted to do it on a day when the bees would have a few warm-ish days they could recover in and a warm enough day that a good bunch of the bees will be out-and-about and not at the hive.

Happy bees!

We set a weekday to do it and got the plan all dialed up. We needed to juggle a few things while we did this and of course, when we did I finally got stung. Ugh … it was a 2 week antibiotic treatment for that best. I was going to share the picture of my ankle but Sarah made me take it down. Having been stung once, Sarah will now be the star of the following video. 🙂

November 2019 – Harvesting

Well we got the hive ready for harvest and my ankle recovered but we still had to get the honey out. This is where Sarah comes in:

Thank you Everybody!

We really hope you enjoy this RIDICULOUS labor of love and enjoy it this holiday season. And yes, we’re going to keep at it with the bees moving forward. 🙂

Merry Christmas and hope you all enjoy! If you have feedback by all means drop us a line at us@kvetut.com!