We’ve had a lot of issues with keeping the hives leveled in the backyard, so we tried something new before our bees’ arrival We threw down some gravel and some cinderblocks, threaded the wooden posts through, and BAM!
Next, we used that hand tiller to uproot all of that grass. It was a pain in the back, so we only did the bare-minimum before Katie’s birthday electric tiller showed up.
Why all the tilling? Well, it’s time to say goodbye to grass back here. Dan’s crazy bee attack last year was triggered by the lawn mower, so we figured we should do our best to avoid that.
Besides…clover is prettier and easier to manage.
We are throwing down a layer of topsoil and then sprinkling it with a million clover seeds. We’ll let you know how that goes.
School 46
We also have 2 colonies at School 46 for our future Beekeeping Club:
If you are interested, visit our YouTube videos where I introduce the bees to our students!
As with all our other hives, we plan to check on these every 7-10 days.
Interesting Fact: 2 out of 4 of these hives are currently queenless. Eek!
I gave them a bunch of sugar patties to make sure they were still well fed and hoped for the best. A month later we were down to 2 hives. A week after that, 1 hive.
So, so, so, lame. This is the first year since my first year of beekeeping that I lost 100% of our colonies. Three hives appear to have died from mites, and one died from humidity/mold.
These tubes fit the tray perfectly, which had me so excited. I was able to fill 50 tubes at once. You can overfill the tray to prevent the sunken in effect. Once it dries, you can use the scraper to remove excess wax and leave it with a perfect, even top. The labels fit perfectly. 
This was a drone bee climbing up a blade of grass. It would continuously climb up the blade over and over again. It could not fly because it was born with damaged wings from mites. 
Do not let the 3rd box, our honey super, fool you into thinking that this one is doing well. This hive was once thriving and full of jerks, but it is now struggling to survive. While I was in there, I saw a queen emerge from a supercedure queen cell. Some of the worker bees noticed this happening and decided to get in there and murder her. Selfishly defying nature, I gently pushed away the worker bees so I could watch the queen. She climbed down the frame, where I’m sure the murder was completed. This hive has a whole lot going on that is all wrong. There are spotty worker cell frames in places where they shouldn’t be. There are several queen cups all over the place. I might downsize them to a nuc box if they don’t get it together soon.
While hive #1 couldn’t stop swarming, we decided to try hive splitting. We took one of the many frames with a capped queen cell, a few frames of worker bees, and some empty frames, and threw them in one of these boxes. We were pretty sure this was going to be a failure, but figured it couldn’t hurt to try. You may not be able to tell from the photo, but these boxes can only fit 5 frames, where our other hives fit 8. They are really working hard to fill up the second box. I plan to leave them alone until I treat them for mites.
Ignore the crooked hive cover. These girls were mad at me for messing with them. Dan was stung twice, and I was stung once. I figured I best adjust that cover once they calm down. These are the bees who swarmed between 2 fences back in May. They appear to be doing really well right now. I do not expect to be taking any honey from them this year, but hopefully they will make it through the winter and be awesome for us next season.
This is what we call success. I harvested a ton of wax from them, and gladly saw that our first honey super is 90% finished with capped honey. They are working hard on the second one.
We “rescued” them by having one of us pound the fence on the wooden side, while the other swept the bees into a box on the wired side.
Besaw's Bee Sauce 