Garden Geekery

Now comes the really fun—and relatively easy—part. First item of business: acquire buckets. A lot of beekeepers seem to use 5-gallon buckets for storing honey. They’re easy and cheap to come by, and you can get them in food-grade plastic.…

Like Christmas morning! (Saturday, August 24) Ian and Beth Munger, of Blue Line Honey, generously hosted a honey-extracting party at their home for the Southern Adirondack Beekeepers Association, and also very generously invited me even though I’m not a member…

I haven’t updated my blog in a while—mostly because I haven’t really inspected my hives in a while. I ended up hurting my shoulder over the summer, which severely limited the amount of lifting I could do. Luckily, my husband…

So, this is a bit of a long story: Earlier this year, I ordered a package of bees to replace the colony that didn’t make it through the winter. They were supposed to be ready for pickup the first week of…

So my husband recently received Google Glass through his employment. Briefly, Glass is Google’s newest attempt at wearable tech: A thing you wear like a pair of glasses but that projects email et al. on a tiny screen just above your line…

So I totally slacked off in updating this blog since last fall. Figured I’d try to catch up with just the highlights before things start to get hectic again. Going into the winter, Andoria looked nice and strong; Vulcan seemed…

Robbing: a sad but pretty incredible phenomenon to witness. Honeybees have a sense of smell at least as good as a dog (and are in fact replacing dogs in some bomb-sniffing situations). When you leave frames of honey sitting outside…

Checked Andoria this past weekend. This was the hive that has had no brood at all for weeks, and the one to which I introduced a new queen last week. I was super excited to see capped brood and larvae…

Experienced beekeepers tend to pooh-pooh protective gear (except for the veil—always necessary). Gloves make it difficult to work the bees without squishing them; bee suits are hot, bulky, and, most beekeepers think, unnecessary: the bees aren’t going to sting much…

Wow, it’s been a summer of ups and downs for these bees and me! So the hive that swarmed successfully raised another queen on their own. That wait was a little nervewracking. It took a little over a month from…