aggienaut | Jun. 10th, 2009

   People often ask me what exactly beekeepers do. Similarly, I often find myself doing things and thinking "I bet people don't think of beekeepers doing THIS"

   Yesterday was such a day, as Dave and I spent the day clearing underbrush in a meadow to prepare to put beehives there. So I was spending my time raking the bajeezes out of the area.
   In so doing we upset a nest of these giant ants, which proceeded to try to eat us. So we got the any poison and carpet bombed that corner. Ants are more than just a nuisance -- they sneak into hives and steal the honey. We've had numerous hives fail due to ant robbery.
   Hobbyists usually put their hives on stilts with ant poison around the base of the stilts (or the stilts actually sitting in cups of oil), but on a large scale putting hives on stilts isn't practical. So we are constantly battling ants.

   The other day I ordered some 150 hive boxes, which should arrive tomorrow or the next day. They are assembled, but not painted, so this means that I'll probably spend at least a day painting hives.

   And then there's the miscelleneous things such as ordering equipment, assembling equipment, cleaning equipment. I think I spend as much time not working directly with bees as I do working with them.
   The hives are all pretty full of honey though right now, so I'm optimistic we'll be doing a honey harvest before too long. That will entail numerous steps which I will no doubt document at the time.

   But in the mean time, we recently established two new bee yards up in the forested hills at around 2,500 ft, and the one I was clearing yesterday will make a third. The area is so beautiful I would love to go camping right there were the bees are. It's going to be a great place to work (and is so lush, it's going to be a great place for the BEES to work).

   Here is a picture of one of the yards up there:

(I took this as soon as we arrived at this yard -- we don't know why that one in the foreground was off kilter, but I'm blaming chupacabra)