DOW GARDENS' BEE BLOG

Michigan State University recommends before you begin beekeeping, you should at minimum read a book, attend a seminar, be hands-on in a hive, and find a mentor. One of the best things a beginning beekeeper can do is to get a mentor. Work with someone with more experience and knowledge, asking questions, get experience dealing with the surprises that come…

The spring started out strong in the Whiting Forest hives. Lots of healthy bees. The novice in me thought that was incredible and we should have an easy season! Well it is incredible these days to have that kind of survival rate, but what I didn’t know were the ramifications of a strong hive coupled with a really heavy nectar…

The main challenge of every beekeeper is to keep their bees healthy and therefore have a better chance at colony survival (especially through the winter). A colony of bees is a super organism—an animal—and like all domesticated animals, honeybees rely on humans for well being and health.  Everything we do, with the exception of harvesting honey, has the goal of…

As we all work to just survive these trying times, we will all have days that are highs and lows. But we are like the honeybees, if we all work together (in our case staying apart), we can have a stronger ‘hive’ for it. There are a lot of things that can negatively impact a honeybee hive: pests and diseases…

After we hosted a seminar called “Is Beekeeping for Me?,” I have decided that yes indeed it is. There is a lot of work to do BEFORE spring comes to get ready to launch my own hive(s). That lead me to ask the question, ‘what do beekeepers do during the winter?’ There are three main aspects of this: maintaining bee…

If you have raw honey, from this season (or from previous seasons), it is possible/likely that at this point in the year, it is starting to crystallize. While I know how to temporarily ‘fix’ the problem, I wanted to know more about WHY it happened (scientist in me). I am lucky to have a good source of information – the beekeepers in the area, so I spoke with people who know and also referenced Google. I found a great bunch of articles online; one in particular that I felt gave a concise summary of why and how crystallization happens. From that, I gleaned the most important points for people to understand; I thought this was good information to share.

So this has been a year of surprises, but I thought I was beyond the big ones now. As you will remember we harvested the majority of the honey from the hives at Whiting Forest the first week in September. We decided that there was still a lot of nice weather and blooming flowers so we put one honey super on each hive to see what would happen. 

I am a little behind as fall has been really busy at the Gardens, but I have one crazy thing to share! We went into the hives on September 18th. It wasn’t really feeling much like fall yet, but the bees knew!

So this is a tough edition to write, as I am still sore, literally and figuratively from being stung at the hive this week. Elly and I decided this might be a good opportunity to discuss times and situations when you should NOT go into your hives