Buzzing With Excitement

Yes, we are buzzing with excitement because soon we'll be adding a honey bee hive to the farm!  When we started planning and thinking about things we'd be doing here, like gardening and animals on the farm, Victoria really liked the idea of starting a bee hive.  For her, it's a personal challenge because she's suffered from 'bug' anxiety and deeply feared anything that buzzed nearby.  It's always triggered her fear and flight mode, so why not just get some bees to cure that anxiety!  Right!

The idea of harvesting honey is also appealing, and there seems to be a growing number of hives and people willing to try their hand at being an apiarist.  The honey industry has been fueling the beekeeper market with fear of massive hive die offs due to mysterious causes that will lead to crop failures and food shortages for lack of pollinators.  It's actually been a successful campaign because just about every farm supply store now carries bee keeping supplies and sells starter colonies.  A few years ago you could only find those things in specialty stores or a few online vendors.

There is some truth to colony collapse disorder, although it's been an issue for longer than the general public may have been aware.  Like everything, it's complicated.  The reality is honey bees aren't native to North America, so they actually compete with native pollinators for food.  If you're a bee keeper you obviously don't want to lose your hive to an unknown cause, and the honey industry needs production and consumers...so there you go.   Maybe big Ag has something to fear, but I guess that's partly why we're homesteading and working on producing food for ourselves.

Anyway, as new keepers we wanted to educate ourselves as much as possible, and we've been doing lots of learning.  Victoria got her first brood chamber for Christmas and a few apiarist supplies, like a protective suite, smoker, and tools.  A coworker of mine heard we were planning on starting a hive and coincidentally her husband was quitting the bee hobby and had some supers he wanted to get rid of.  Now we have enough brood chambers and honey supers for two hives!

This weekend will be busy, we've got a huge list of chores and projects that have been piling up because the Spring rain has kept us from getting some of the gardening done, and we're also still adjusting from only taking care of a small house on a city lot to caring for an old farm house, old out buildings in need of repair, and 21 acres of pasture and fencing...not to mention the animals we've already added to the family farm.  We do need to prioritize some things though because next weekend we pick up our first colony of bees.  That means we need to get our hives cleaned and ready for the new Carniolan Queen!

References:
GloryBee Bee Weekend 2018
Colony Collapse Disorder, Wikipedia