Advice to start with two hives is a good one. I’ve had my hives a little over a month, and started to notice the population of one dropping off considerably the last few days. I’ve also noticed comparatively more drones around the weaker hive. The queen is present and alive in the weak hive, but there is also a fair amount of drone comb. From what I’ve read, it tells me I probably have an infertile queen who is laying eggs, but those eggs are all hatching into drones since they only have one set of chromosomes. I don’t know that I would have noticed had I not had the

As a brand new beekeeper with lots of newbie questions, I learned pretty quickly there is no one right answer to most of my questions. Questions like: How much should I feed my new bees? It depends — folks say you don’t want them to weaken and starve just as they’re getting established, but you do want them to have an incentive to forage on their own. Knowing the right amount to feed takes watching the bees — are they actively foraging and are they coming back heavy with pollen and nectar? Is the activity of the hive increasing, diminishing, or staying about the same? When you’re an inexperienced beekeeper like I

The girls were stuck in their hives for a couple of days with the rain. They apparently don’t like to fly when it’s cold and wet outside. As soon as the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, though, they were all over the garden lapping up raindrops from leaves and flowers. Coming back to the hive I noticed some of the bees were undershooting the landing board. I think because they were so heavy with water and nectar, they ended up landing on the ground until they could either drop some water weight or muster the strength to make it back up to the hive entrance.

Two bee colonies arrived last night in “nuc” boxes. I hear it isn’t a good idea to move bees once they’ve made their way home inside the hive at night, so I removed the yellow entrance blocker from their boxes and left them to come and go as they please until the next day. Today I installed them in their new home. The bee provider was kind enough to locate the queens and put them in a queen cage for transport so I could be sure I have a live queen for each hive. Installation was easy. I put on my bee suit, lit my smoker, smoked around the nuc box a

Assembled my first beehives today. The parts come precut, so assembly entails a bunch of nailing and gluing pieces together to form the hive boxes, inner covers, hive stands, and outer cover. The bottom boards are screened and have a grid beneath the screen to make counting any unwanted pests — like Varroa mites — easier. Fingers crossed, mites will be a nonissue. Next comes sanding the outer wood and finishing. Most people I’ve talked with paint the outsides of their hives to protect the wood from the elements. I’m going to try using a couple coats of food-grade mineral oil, followed by a raw linseed oil and beeswax mix,