A few months ago I was surprised to find an email from Kim at Voyage Chicago, an online magazine. Their mission is to “build a platform that fosters collaboration and support for small businesses, independent artists and entrepreneurs, local institutions and those that make our city interesting. I have no idea how Kim found us, but […]
The Burrs and the Bees
Honeycomb is a marvel of engineering. Darwin once wrote that it “is absolutely perfect in economizing labor and wax”. It is the foundation on which everything else in the hive is possible. Honeycomb is a home, storage facility, a womb for baby bees, food processing center and a hub for all the other activities of […]
First Looks at the Hives!
Here’s a collection of pictures from the last three weeks. The weather has been cold, rainy, and windy so we haven’t been able to observe the bees as much as we’d like. They’re still clumping together in the center frames for warmth. Click on image to enlarge.
Making Themselves At Home
While the bees in the orange hive were getting acclimated to their new home, we prepped the yellow hive as soon as we could because the bees were starting to die. Since the yellow one has the medium supers, we couldn’t place the package directly in. Bethany had to work so I was on my […]
Prepping the Hives
Here’s where things got a little tricky. When the bees came in, the day before Easter, for some reason our people at The Hive couldn’t contact us. I saw it on Instagram and contacted them. That Monday I rushed up there, got the hive parts and bees. There was some confusion between what we thought we […]
Prepping Hive Area
Bethany and I cleaned out the hive area, getting rid of garbage, piles of dirt, a safety cone, tin cans, and a few abandoned frames. We found a tiny broom behind one of the planter boxes and basically wore those old bristles down to the handle. We pulled all the old vines off the trellis and chicken […]
