Did you know honey bees are becoming extinct? The articles I’m reading aren’t encouraging and we might not be able to do much but we can do something.

Our daughter went to the local Kirkwood Community College and therefore we got emails of upcoming classes/courses. When I saw the class for bee keeping it piqued my curiosity. I however am too chicken for such a thing but my husband is not. He’s always willing to try so I mentioned it to him and he signed up, paid the minimal fees and attended classes taught by local bee keepers.

What I have learned is that there are three kinds of bees in a hive. One queen, drones (male bees) and worker bees (females) The queens sole job is to reproduce and reproduce she does. I read she can lay up to 1500 eggs a day. Can that really bee?

So in an effort to help the bee population we purchased equipment. A suit complete with helmet/face shield & gloves, multiple supers, a smoker, feeder and more. When these were all brought home we placed the supers outside and the rest of the equipment in the garage. To explain a super is housing for the bees with honeycomb framework for the bees to produce. There are shallow supers and deep ones. We stacked both side by side and left them alone until we were ready to buy a NUC(a small colony with a queen)

This week we were ready and had one of the teachers over to see our supers and visit about where to place them. We had noticed there were bees around them but until she confirmed it we didn’t know we already had a colony in one of them. We did nothing to nurture them and they made a home so we were advised to leave them and see how it goes. Next we waited until nightfall to move their super and packed up the second one to pick up a NUC.

All said and done our little bee town is started. So far they are happy and working. We feed them sugar water and as you can’t get too near a hive or colony during the day or when its raining (they aren’t the happiest then to be disturbed) we checked their food last night. It was completely empty. We’ve been advised not to collect honey this year as it will be needed to sustain the bees through the winter for their first season here. Next week we are adding another super on top of the NUC super we got Monday so they can spread out more. I guess so if the Queen lays that much in one day!

We may not be changing the world but we are adding to it hopefully in a positive way.