Our first round of caging yielded 81% out of 560 nucs. We caged on the 20th day for fear that the take might not have been as good and we felt there would be a need to re-queen sooner rather than…

Yellow jessamine… lovely, but deadly. At this time of the year, and in most years a month prior to this, we have to deal with a poisonous source of nectar. It comes from a native climbing vine here in central…

Sometimes, meaning to do good things, our unintended consequences can cause more trouble than good. I’ve included a picture of a queen that I painted with a blue dot several weeks ago when I came across her during hive manipulation.…

We put out 600 strong looking mating nucs yesterday and put cells in them this morning. We had to tuck the cells down because of the cool weather and expect it to hang around for another 24 hours before things…

It seems strange that here in central Florida, 3 hours south of the Georgia border, our bees are 3 weeks behind bees in Pensacola and Lake City in Florida, and Way Cross in Georgia. We have beekeeper friends in all…

We have received a little over 6 inches of rain over the last week here in Sumter Florida. We also saw our first 3 frosts. We spoke about Chill Degree hours last week. Well, we’re getting them now. Yesterday, we…

Well… we were supposed to have begun our grafting by this time, but the bees in the cell yard, as well as hives out in the field that would be used for the first nucleuses, have thrown us a curve.…

This second week of January brought our first cold weather of the winter season here in Florida. As the bees hunker down in clusters during cold nights, we are in the midst of the beginnings of blueberry pollination, which for…

Many of you have commented that we have not been posting on our blog. As you can see from our last post in January, 2013, this is true. Chris is inherently lazy. But, with the help of his daughter-in-law, Jen…