Late Summer, Early Fall Requeening

Posted by on Oct 15, 2011 | 1 comment More beekeepers are beginning to advocate late Summer and early Fall requeening of colonies.  The rationale for this is based on a variety of reasons.  The more convincing arguments are 1) a young queen during late Summer / early Fall will lay more prolifically, producing more bees at this critical stage of the year to maximize the odds of surviving winter.  2) a late Summer / early Fall queen...
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Backyard Queen Rearing

Posted by on Jul 18, 2011 | 1 comment Last year we attempted to raise our own queens via grafting and didn’t meet with much success. The only way we seemed to be able to raise our own queens was to simply split in the Spring and make sure the queenless side of the split had young brood to raise their own queen with. This however didn’t give us much ability to do selection on which stock we wanted to propagate. This...
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Making Splits and Queens

Posted by on May 21, 2011 | 4 comments We’ve been very busy in our apiary the past week or so splitting our stronger wintered colonies.   When conditions are right in the Spring, a healthy colony of bees will see its population expand very rapidly.  Unless the beekeeper intervenes, the old queen will leave the hive with two thirds of the worker bee population, and find a place to set up shop elsewhere. You may have witnessed...
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