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Thank you for all of that great information and it's nice to meet you. We have had our bees for 3 months now (I edited my initial post to reflect that), and they are everything you said. It's just going to take me a few days to get everything posted to where we are today, which is honey extraction. I love sitting out by the hives every morning having my cup of tea and just watching them fly in and out of the hives, they are so amazing. Thank you for the thread links, I know I will have questions, the learning curve is huge.@cavemanrich, thanks for the tag.
@drstratton, congratulations! Bees are/have been many things to us. Interesting, exciting, fascinating, aggravating, frustrating, and most of all, humbling. You learn pretty quickly: Bees gonna do what bees gonna do.
In no particular order, here are some things we've learned.
Nucs definitely are easier than packages, and worth the extra cost.
Two hives is a GREAT idea. You have another hive under the exact same circumstances/set up to compare to.
The hive catching the morning light is a good idea, especially in the cooler weather of spring and fall. Blocking cold winds of winter is also a good idea.
When you inspect the hive, stand to the side of it as much as you can. As someone told me, "You're coming home from the grocery store, you have your arms full of groceries. Or you need to get out and go to work. But there's a giant standing in front of the door. Yeah, you might get pissed."
Read up on varroa mites. They are the main pest you will have to deal with. They are one of the main reasons hives fail.
If there is someone who keeps bees near you, offer to help with whatever bee task they have on hand. Just being another pair of hands can be a help. If there is a beekeepers club near you, join.
If you join a club and there are 10 members, you will get 10 different opinions on how to deal with whatever issue is brought up. What works for one person, in their particular set up, might not work as well for someone else. Different experiences, different opinions. Listen, take notes, and see what might work for you.
There is a phrase that didn't make sense when we first heard it, but absolutely makes sense now:
The queen is the queen, but comb is king.
If you have bare frames, the bees need to draw out comb before they do anything. Comb takes a lot of work, a lot of resources, from the bees. If there isn't anything in bloom (called a "dearth"), you need to supply them with sugar syrup. Look for information on when you should feed your bees, as this is another big topic.
Here are two beekeeping threads here on BYC. There are some very knowledgeable members on them. I really am a bee novice.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/the-wally-gee-bee-journey-.1575400/
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/the-honey-factory.1358454/
Comb is definitely king. We have syrup on all but our strongest hive and it had syrup until we added supers. I wanted some pure honey. We will start giving them syrup again, after they clean up the comb from the extraction we're doing today. We are getting close to our dearth, but then there will be buckwheat and I think there are mint fields in our area.
We definitely want to have strong winter bees and will do everything we can to get them there. We currently have OA strips in our hives and we also use drone boards. Varroa mites are so nasty. I think we will be treating with Apivar in August. I would like to use Formic Pro, but it will be much to hot here.
Thank you again and I look forward to learning from you and other more experienced beekeepers than myself. I want to learn how to raise queens. I'm also thinking about turning my resource hive into an observation hive, I think that would be so cool.
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this paragraph,,, Sooooo True.
Not to worry, it got much better after that.
