Whoops! Guess we failed to keep the blog up to date in 2014. So, let’s recap.
I don’t remember why I was taking a picture of the back of the truck, but there was one persistent bee that really, really wanted to be in the picture.
The beginning of the year looked promising. Our worker girls came through the polar vortex in fine form – didn’t lose a colony. We made a couple of splits, one survived, we named it Mongo. And then it started to rain. And rain. And more rain. And it appears that we lacked blooms/nectar and by September, Mongo starved out. Starved out! Unheard of! And ultimately, we harvested zero, zip, nadda, honey. It appears the more-established colonies (everyone other than Mongo) could gather enough nectar and pollen to subsist but surplus was not to be found, meaning the bipeds (Mark and & I) did not get honey. So, we cooked up sugar syrup and more sugar syrup and intensively fed the bees before winter set in. We haven’t been able to open any of the hives this winter, so we’re hoping everyone is still alive. The next time it gets up to 50° we’ll do our best to get out there and throw on more bee food.
Mead! Beautiful, tasty mead!
MEANWHILE, the mead we started in 2014 was bottled around Thanksgiving. And, we immediately started drinking it because, well, why not. We now have ~24 gallons perking along in the basement – orange spice, blackberry and cyser are aging nicely.
A November 2014 drive-by showed live bees in all five hives.
And so we wait. We wait for winter to pass and spring to be sprung, and then we do it all over again. But hopefully this time we harvest honey!
Idiots Keeping Bees 