bee happy

as new members of the nashville beekeepers association, we are encouraged to attend as many official functions as possible.  last week, we had the opportunity to attend a field exercise and a package installation.

in this photo, member walt is removing frames from his brood box to check for mites and signs of superceding (when the bees replace the queen, can have many reasons for happening)

walt and jim are trying to locate the queen, by the time we were finished, they had not located her but had located several queen cells.  this indicated  the possibility of a swarm or that they were replacing the queen.  this hive is in the ellington apiary and is walt's personal colony.

in this photo, jim has opened up one of naba's two colonies in the ellington apiary.  he is very confidant around the bees and doesn't always wear protective gear.  he went through all of the boxes in the colony in the hope of locating the queen and for general purposes of checking on the hive.  he was able to find a queen but it was not the one from last year, she was marked with a red dot.  this indicates that she was superceded (replaced).  there was some speculation that the hive may have swarmed-the old queen could have left with some of the bees but that was all subject to opinion and when you have two experienced bee keepers give you an opinion, expect at least three!

here jim is preparing to install a package into a new hive.  when you order bees by mail, yes that is a very common practice, they come in a box like this.  you must first pop out the lid on top so the bees will come out.

jim isn't the only one who was without gear, there were several people just as brave-not me or darry!
jim demonstrates the method of dumping them out of the box and into the brood chamber by banging on the bottom of the box.

here he installed a hood small hive beetle trap.  it will catch those pesky small hive beetles and prevent them from making a mess in the hive.

now it is time to add the queen.  first you must remove the cork from the candy end of the little box.

this little box gets placed on top of the frames and by the time the bees eat the candy to release the queen, they will be accustomed to her scent and they will recognize her as their queen.  if we are lucky, that is.  sometimes they don't and they can kill her.

 
next, jim placed an inner cover that has a hole in the center on top of the brood chamber.  this will allow him to feed the bees without bees from other colonies taking advantage of the sugar water-called robbing.

he then placed an empty super over the inner cover.
and then a second empty super so it would be tall enough to house the bottle of syrup-1:1 sugar and water.  the lid has very small holes in it and it will allow the bees to slowly drink it since they do not have any honey stored to feed from.  this was then covered with a lid and a weight.

if all goes well, the girls (as jim likes to call them-the workers are all females!) will begin to build out the comb and the queen (who is already mated) will begin to lay eggs.  before we know it, the hive will be storing nectar and pollen and producing honey.  if all goes well, they will make enough honey to overwinter successfully.  only time will tell!

back in the swing of things

so here it is, a month into spring and i haven't done much to update the garden blog.  please forgive me, it has been a busy month and we have been sorely lagging behind in our gardening duties at home.  the demo garden looks wonderful though.  luckily, for us, the weather has been cooperating.  it hasn't warmed up as quickly as it does some springs and this is working to our favor since we were late in starting seeds.  one thing we have done is start our lasagna beds along the front walkway of the house.  they had completely compacted over the winter and we added new layers and plants.  

the view of the walkway with the lasagna bed at the corner in the foreground and all the way at the end of the walk in the top left corner of the photo.  the spaces inbetween have been filled in with iris, hostas, ajuga, trifolium (fancy clover) and other shade tolerant plants.  the beds along the house on this side of the steps also have seen new additions of hostas, heucheras, convullaria (lily of the valley) and more.  the beds on the other side of the steps, which are not shown in the picture have many new plants including, native phlox, dicentra (bleeding hearts), hostas, heuchera, may apples, convullaria, autumn ferns and more.  the lasagna bed is pictured with it's first new layer-fresh cut grass.

a close-up of the grass layer

the second layer is pine needles.  this is the small bed at the end of the walkway.  it recieves more sun than the large bed so it will feature slightly different plants.

after adding a layer of leaves to both beds, i topped it off with a layer of peat moss.

a variety of shade loving coleus and begonias were planted in the bed and the surface was sprinkled with lime to help lower the acid level in the bed.  

this bed has some verbena along with the begonias and coleus and it also was limed.

out in the front of the yard is a raised bed that forms a circle around our little silver maple tree.  the bed is planted with tulips and daffodils as well as some creeping phlox, hyacinths and a bunch of snapdragons that self sow each year.

the lilac bush was beautiful this year, we had many blooms to cut and enjoy in vases in the house.