it has been a very nice spring for bees. for the two hives i had over winter, spring started back when they were able to bring in nectar on a regular basis not hampered by weather and helped by their own burgeoning population. for me it was when i put the supers on them to collect the extra honey. this year, it was close to the same time which is what you want. one of the hives , the one that blew over the least, ....

...okay, editor's note. i am writing this from my apartment with the windows open, and there is rain in the forecast. i can totally smell it coming. you know that smell the air gets before it rains? i love that smell. even in the city, it reminds me of nature.

alright, back to it

so at the time of spring one of the hives already had a honey barrier so i dropped three supers on that one right away. a honey barrier is a barrier of honey which is at least an inch thick or more of the top of the frames in the top box. this guarantees that after you put on the supers the queen won't walk past it and lay eggs in those supers that are for the worker bees to put the excess honey in for me to take out for us to eat. i think in some countries bee larvae could be a delicacy, but not for me anyway. that hive is jammin one. last i looked a couple weeks ago they were already working in the second super. i might go out there this weekend to look at them. i bet they already have the second one filled. glad i have more supers here to put on in case. i'd be dang shocked, but pleased of course.

the second one well... it was a worthwhile experiment. at spring time they didn't quite have a honey barrier, but i did not want to leave them empty of space to work in. when they feel crowded they swarm. they raise a second queen and half the hives flies off with one of them to find a home and make a hive somewhere else. i did not want this to happen. when that happens it greatly reduces the population in the hive and it takes time for the colony population to build up to be strong enough to take advantage of all the nectar that is out there. so, since i did not want that to happen, but i didn't want a queen laying in my honey, i put on a queen excluder on the advice of another beekeeper. this is an insidious device. it is a kind of screen that goes between the egg laying area and the supers. the worker bees can move through it, but it is too small for the queen to fit through. seems like it ought to do the trick. well i guess these bees didn't read the same books or order from the same catalogs i did. they just built wax around the screen and essentially blocked the supers above them from being accessed by the workers at all. the cramped space i was trying to avoid occurring, occurred anyhow. what this means is the step i took to ensure them more room backfired, and they swarmed anyway. they do not have the first box filled, and if i am lucky, i will get one box from them by the end of the nectar season.

some beekeepers swear by excluders, others do not use them with just as much fervor. i will not use them any more. swarming is how bees reproduce. how can a piece of hardware prevent the urge to continue as a specie? i was told bees are the second most written about topic in the world. the first of course, being love. once you get into bees you soon realize, we know about as much about either topic as the other.