Eetz all Beezness
Happy Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday, which ever you’d like to call it!
So for a while now I’ve been bugging husband and telling him I wanted bees. Why bees is beyond me, but it is something I got in my head I wanted. We’ve been together (dating + marriage) since July 2009 and he’s heard about Bees on and off since then.
My dad has kind of even gotten in on it and randomly sent us listings for bees for sale every now and again. Last week, the Bee-sness started again. I got 3 emails from my dad about places to buy bees. Of course I sent them on to hubby. The next thing I knew, he was on Youtube watching videos about bee keeping.
Before I knew it, we made a decision that we were getting Bees. Now we don’t get the actual bees until Mid April, but we went ahead and located the hives to get them all put together and set up now. They came in this last weekend so we spent the weekend putting them together and painting them.
He looks so excited! Maybe even a little too excited? Nah! He’s holding “Frame Feeders”. You fill them with sugar water to feed the bees when the nectar flow is not available.
His helmet & the screen guard. Keeps you from getting stung!
The black is the Foundation for the frames. The blue Hive tool is used for prying apart the boxes after the bees glue them together with propolis. Bee gloves, don’t want him getting stung! The white looking thing is an entrance feeder. The queen doesn’t get to go up where the worker bees are, so this helps feed her. And the yellowish looking bands are leg bands that hold your pant legs tight so little bees cant crawl up them. So you don’t have to do the bee dance!
Top left to bottom right: box of box parts, box parts, bottom board that your bee boxes set on, queen excluder (which keeps the queen in the brood chamber and keeps her from laying eggs in the area where you will harvest honey from), inner cover, and outer cover.
Next you stack it all together, 2 brood boxes for the queen to use to populate the hive, then the queen excluder (did you realize the queen can’t fit through the grates but the worker bees can?)
finally honey super’s.
T came over Saturday while hubby was assembling the frames, so he jumped in and helped. The frames are what the bees will use to build comb on and store their honey if they are in the honey supers (the upper boxes), or they will build comb and the queen will lay eggs in it (down below in her chambers) as well as store honey to feed the babies.
Then just paint them your favorite color. Most people go with white, but hubby chose my fave color.
Cool! I love how when you guys make up your minds that you're going to do something, you jump right in! I wish I could do something like this! Well…maybe not bees…they kind of scare me. But just dive into something fun and cool and different…you've got me thinking!! 🙂
How cool! Love the process of getting that together for the bees.
That is such an amazing process. My hubs is terribly allergic, so I doubt I could talk him into it!
Oh gosh, you guys are soooo brave! I'd be afraid I'd get stung.
Stef at TooMuchToDoSoLittleTime.com
Good luck with that!
You know I gotta say, I don't think I would want to keep bees and I know for a fact my husband would not, he is afraid of them. But oh so jealous of the fresh honey you are going to have!
I bet you're going to have the BEST HONEY EVER! I'm a little afraid of bees so I'm not sure I could do this. I'm excited to see how this goes! So you get them in April?
I love that color! It's so pretty!
Thanks for linking up!
I wanted to ask a question and I forgot. Can they attack you? I keep thinking about that movie with the Culkin kid and his best friend (a girl) dies.
I would not want to do bees. But…I am thinking of growing pumpkins this year!!!
That is so cool! I have never known anyone who had bees – it will be fun to her how it goes in April!!
Thanks so much for visiting my blog yesterday!!!
~Becca
That is cool! Bee careful!!! And do your homework. Do you know they can catch “bugs” and viruses??? My exboss's dad had bees and they didn't do to well when they got sick. I do not know the specifics. It looks like a fun project is a way. I wouldn't mind the fresh honey and all but not the actual bees.
That is awesome!! My dad had bees awhile back.. its to dry in our part of the world for them to do well though.
How cool is that? I'm looking forward to reading about the bees when you get them! 🙂 And that's very cool your hubby painted the hives your favorite color. 🙂
Long before we met, my hubby apparently built an observation hive in his apartment (he went to college with the landlord of his apartment building, so he had the OK to cut a hole in the outside wall for their entrance and exit…crazy, I know!) He's been talking lately about getting bees in the Back 40 – I wonder if he'll decide to just do it like you guys did! 🙂
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