We appreciate all of you who've stopped by to have a look-see. I'd been working with this on my desktop for quite a few months, until it seemed reasonable to take it live and have some fun. Your encouragement and kind words mean a lot. We have already had a spammer, who
I opened a 4-frame bee nuc, or small hive, a bit ago to see if the new queen was laying yet. Found a very nice dark queen who appeared to be mated and ready to go to work. But then on the next frame I found another, golden, virgin queen. Actually she had BEEN a virgin, since she had mating sign protruding from her abdomen, a clear indication that she'd just come back from her honeymoon (so to speak) and around 15 drones had recently died with
I've taken pics like this a half-dozen times before, and they always turned out sorta, well, BLAH! you know? But this one I like, and hopefully you will, too. I took it on a sunny day when zillions of young bees were making their orientation flights--the first couple of times they leave the hive, they get their bearings from the sun and landmarks as to where they are. That keeps them from getting lost when they start
One consequence of modern-day (after, say, the late 1980s) beekeeping is the sad fact that colonies die over the winter a lot oftener than they used to. This is due to the mites we've been cursed with, as well as new diseases and, some say, pesticides and loss of plant diversity. Be that as it may, when spring rolls around in the beeyard a lot of us have empty hives,called deadouts, that need to be recolonized.
We've currently got one hive of bees just off Egypt Pike in Ross County. They sit on the farm of a coworker who used to have bees himself years ago, until he started getting sensitized to bee stings. This site has had a checkered past for me.
The tornado last fall in the Wooster, Ohio area did a huge amount of damage. One casualty which most people probably know nothing about was the OSU Bee Lab barn, which was totally destroyed along with everything in it. Replacing this in today's political/financial climate probably just isn't going to happen. I'm saying all of this because of the gentleman who has been OSU's go-to man, for whom beekeeping has been a lifelong passion--Dr. Jim Tew. A good part of his life's work might as well have flown to Oz in that tornado.
