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  1. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    We put the emptied honey frames back in the box on the hive. You never get all the honey out of the comb when you extract, so the ladies have a treat in store! I'm not sure what they do with frames like that. I think they will "fix" the comb so that it's nice and neat again, and start laying in...
  2. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    The boxes are made to fit the frames, so deep frames go in deep boxes, medium frames in medium boxes. There are actually shallow frames and boxes, but that seems a little too small. We (and maybe most) beekeepers use the deep boxes as "brood boxes," ie, where the bees live and raise more bees...
  3. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    We pulled 6 frames. At least one had a full side and an empty side (the side toward the wall of the box). I'm going to tone down my estimate to say 2 1/2 gallons, but I'm more than ecstatic about that! I buy 2 gallons at a time from Ed. Wow, did the box weigh a LOT! I can see why we wanted to...
  4. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    If we do indeed get that much, I will be thinking about making my kombucha with honey. That would take some time, as you have "retrain" the SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast), which is the "mother" of the fermentation process. The bacteria in the SCOBY and the bacteria in honey...
  5. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    Honey extraction will be a new process for us. When we bought our original equipment, it included an extractor. It's a bare bones model, and we'll see how it goes. More educational info. This is basically what all non-commercial extractors look like on the outside. The hive frames sit in...
  6. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    Another reason why queens are so expensive: some beekeepers artificially inseminate her with specially raised bees' sperm to make her young have specific traits. A big one now is VSH, Varroa Sensitive Hygiene. Varroa mites are the bane of beekeepers. They came on the scene in the 80s and...
  7. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    Here's why queens aren't cheap. The keeper has to raise them. They have to go on mating flights and return. An unmated queen is useless. A poorly mated queen is useless. A friend of mine got a bunch of packages of bees (that's different than a nuc) and every hive he put them in failed. Why...
  8. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    The problem with all the rest of our boxes/frames is that the frames are new. This means that there is no comb on them. Bees spend a LOT of energy drawing out comb. There's a phrase among beekeepers: The queen is the queen, but comb is king. If you have frames with drawn comb, the bees can get...
  9. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    You need a queen if you start a new hive. You can actually buy mated queens! They're about $65-80. Yes, for a bug. What we would do is add another box on top of the stack. This is called "supering." The box for honey ("honey super") had what is called a "queen excluder" underneath it so that...
  10. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    We figured out the swarm issue. It's the original hive, and they have 2 boxes of brood and the box on top is FULL of honey! They ran out of room. We think we saw a queen in with them, so they have requeened themselves. They planned for this, in other words. We think. We'll know in a few weeks...
  11. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    This has been a very sad spring. I lost my two favorite hens, Aart here on BYC passed, and my neighbor succumbed to heart failure on Wednesday. Then a hive swarmed and left. And I'm without my car after the accident last Saturday, and don't know how long it'll take to fix, or if they'll total...
  12. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    Yes. The problem is this: This is PRIME egg laying/brood rearing time. The queen can lay 2000 (!!!!) eggs a day. They need to have lots of workers to raise brood and forage for nectar/pollen for food. The colony knows it doesn't have a queen. (Called, appropriately, "queenless"). They have to...
  13. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    Ok, some good news. It's raining, very hard. I will bet we're going to get a half inch out of this. I'll take it; I don't think we've had an inch of rain all month.
  14. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    Today one of our bee hives swarmed. This means that 1/2-2/3 of the bees and the queen left the hive to look for somewhere else to reside. I've never seen this happen; it was very interesting. It was also frustrating, because we lost a hive of bees and we only have two. DH and I are very...
  15. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    My neighbor who had a heart attack 18 months ago passed this afternoon. I will miss her a lot. Fly high and free, beautiful Jamie! Thank you for being a wonderful neighbor, chicken sitter, and friend. :hit
  16. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    We got one of the "brief, heavy downpours" the weather crew on TV was advertising. It's a little smaller than what they showed on TV. We've already used it, so we can't return it, but I hope they run that ad again; I want to order more. Like five or six of them.
  17. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    No word yet on if our car is fixable. I really hope it is; that would be the easiest solution. And I'd really rather all that metal, glass, plastic, and fabric didn't end up in a junkyard or landfill.
  18. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    Oh, one cool thing I saw while we were waiting for the State Trooper and the tow truck... the ditch beside the highway was sparkling with fireflies! There must have been thousands of them out there. I think they came to visit and try to cheer up our car... we named it Firefly when we got it...
  19. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    I got the ball rolling on getting the car fixed or totaled. At first glance, we were pretty sure it would be totaled, but hubby looked a little closer and thinks.... maybe not...? We had it towed to a local collision repair shop. I'm waiting to find out what they think. Everyone I talked to --...
  20. S

    Sally's GF3 thread

    As I've said many times, it's just stuff. That's just it, there wasn't time to be scared! No "oh crap, there's a deer!" One fraction of a second we were looking at pavement, one fraction of a second later, BOOM! I think I would have handled the situation differently had I been driving. Not...
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