The Bees are busy

The bees are in full swing. All hives are humming with activity. The established hives have neverending stream of workers leaving and coming. The Warre bees are busy building the top bar comb. The have built up the comb from all top bars in the top hive in only a week! Amazing. The queenless hive seems to be diing fine as well. There is an activity at the entrance, so hopefully they have started a new queen already. The flow is strong and there seem to be plenty of pollen as well. Bees are arriving LOADED. Check out the Slo Mo video below. (Captured at 60fps and played back at 0.15 speed)

Transferring bees into Warre hive

Today is the day. We will be transferring bees from a new colony we jsut purchased into our first Warre hive. The plan is simple, take bees from each frame and shake them into the Warre. Pay attention to the queen and make sure she goes into the hive. The Warre has only two boxes each with wax foundation strips attached to the top bars to help girls start building their new home. Here is how the transfer went.

We will have bees!

Around Christmas my wife Jitka and I have decided that we will start keeping bees. Not sure why. I guess, because it felt like a right thing to do. Bees are responsible for 1/3 of human food production with their polination. Recently, in last few decades, bees are decimated by multitude of pests and diseases. More people keeping bees the better.
Of course we did not know any of that, when we decided to keep bees. We just wanted to have bees, watch them grow and enjoy the honey.
So, we joined a local beekeeping club, Tampa Bay Beekeepers Association, awesome organization. Met lot of great people and started learning about bees.
Can't wait until we get our own bees.