June 2024 Vacation

We had a great vacation last month. We spent a couple of nights in Cocoa Beach at Beach Place Guesthouses and then we got onboard the Carnival Vista for an eight day cruise where we visited Aruba, CuraƧao, and Grand Turk. Then on the way home we stopped for an afternoon at Panama City Beach and ate dinner at the Wicked Wheel and then walked on the beach a bit before heading for home.

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Setting up a honey bee hive stand on a sloping lot.

Here is a video I made when I set up a hive stand for some package bees that I ordered. This hive stand uses 4 t-posts, 4 large U-bolts, and 2 4×4 posts. It took me about 30 minutes to set this all up.

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Caught my first swarm of 2021!

Yesterday I spent about five hours and drove around 130 miles checking my swarm traps. Out of ten swarm traps, I caught exactly zero swarms. I was feeling kind of sad. This morning I went to Lowes, I always feel better after buying a new tool. When I got home I noticed movement at the swarm trap in my backyard. A swarm had moved in while I was at Lowes!

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Getting bees!

Finding local bees is always hard if you wait too long to start looking. Most of the local beekeepers that sell nucs are usually booked up by this time of year. I’ve got four packages of bees ordered from south Georgia that should ship around May 17, but I really wanted to find a few local nucs that I can pick up. So today I went to the Russian Honey Bee Breeders Association members page and sent emails to all the breeders listed in Mississippi. Two of them replied that they still had some nucs available that would be ready for pick up toward the middle or end of April. Great news! I’ve now got five nucs booked. I’m really excited to get back into beekeeping.

In the morning I’m going to go check my nine swarm traps, aka bait hives, that I placed a few weeks ago. I’ve been getting a lot of reports on social media that several beekeepers in my area have caught multiple swarms already. I’ll report back here, with pictures.

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Bait hives

Started early at Lowes to get a few sheets of plywood to build some bait hives. I’m using this cut list which only has 5% waste per sheet of 15/32 plywood.
It’ll give me 3 bait hives per sheet of plywood and I got 3 sheet, so I should have 9 new bait hives right now. However, my porter cable finish gun blew out an o-ring while I was assembling my first one. This nail gun is quite old and I’ll probably put a new ring and gasket kit in it someday but this gave me the perfect opportunity to buy a new tool. So another trip to Lowes for my new Bostitch brad gun, and heck, while I was there I went ahead and got a new air hose and some brass fittings and a fern for my wife. I’ve found that whenever I buy new tools that it is a good idea to visit the garden center and get her a plant. So by the time I got home and everything was hooked up, I was finishing the first box while slapping mosquitoes at the same time as the sun was setting.
I’m ready to knock out those other 8 boxes bright and early in the morning though.

This is a slight modification of the one built by Brink’s Bees in his YouTube video. I made my box deeper to utilize most of the wasted wood per sheet and increase my volume some. I believe the volume of my box is slightly over 55 liters.

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