Beekeeping Review

Of all the animals we've kept, bees have been the lowest stress. They're great bugs.

My friend Spencer has kept bees before so we teamed up to set up 5 colonies in the garden area. A local commercial beekeeper sold us some bees, they come in a box, a queen and a few pounds of bees. 

The queen has a little box she can be released from by the workers, and that is placed carefully in the hive. Then the rest of the bees are just dumped in. After a few days we check to make sure the queen made it out and is all set up. 

After that, the bees just go to work. No complaining, no begging, they just get out there and start collecting pollen and making it into honey and more bees. 

We gradually add more boxes to the colony. There's a queen separator to keep her in the lower box, producing larvae, while the upper boxes are filled with just honey. We had 3 colonies that were really strong and filled up a few boxes and a couple that were just weak.

We would check on them about every 3-4 weeks, but mostly they just did their thing. In the fall we extracted honey:
1) Taking out most of the frames that are full of honey. 

2) slicing off the wax cap

3) spinning the frames in a centrifuge to drain out the honey

A old commercial beekeeper told me there's always more to learn about bees. That's certainly true for me because this blog post is pretty much all I know. We will now learn if we can keep the bees alive and in their hive over the winter in Wyoming, seems unlikely. Next year we'll learn more and plan to scale up a few more hives in more rangeland locations for different flavor honey.