Philip has owned and operated his own tree service company for over 22 years here in Central Florida. He deals with his share of critters on the job: squirrels, raccoons, carpenter ants, wasps, honeybees, snakes and he even rescues the occasional cat when needed. If you remember, he first started beekeeping from a bee encounter…
Philip and I are in the empty nest stage of life. While one of my daughters live close by, all the rest of our children are scattered across the United States. My youngest daughter, Faith Hardy and her new husband, Stephen came down from Tennessee to spend the weekend with family and friends. While they…
This summer, Philip and I are caring for the home of his parents Danny and Joy Murphy. As retirees, they are spending the summer at Kowalski Mountain. They have quite the flock of birds, about 30 chickens, and 8 turkeys of varying ages. A group of the younger turkeys are escape artists and have been…
This month’s hive maintenance was all about queens. The more we learn about beekeeping, the more I realize that the correlation between a beehive and royalty is no accident. They don’t refer to the matriarch of the hive as the queen for no reason! We encountered some trouble with our queens, that we had to…
Momma turkey disappeared on us a few weeks ago. We looked high and low for her, suspecting she figured out how to escape her new home. I found her, quietly sitting in the corner of the yard. Our newly constructed poultry yard was quite dense with undergrowth and she easily blended in. As I approached…
Our recent experience with queenless hives and the hatching of new queens has had me curious about how honeybees “make” a new queen bee. As a new beekeeper, Philip often has YouTube on to learn about a variety of subjects. You can imagine that as of late; beekeeping has been a hot topic of study…
When Philip and I began talking about the 2021 garden, I advocated growing a container garden. If you recall, we have had very large gardens the last two years, so a container garden seemed like a step backward. However, the alternative was that we would not have a garden for 2021. I’m so glad we…
Harvesting the first zucchini of the season calls for breaking out my recipe collection to use this much-anticipated harvest in a very special way. No, I didn’t grill it, or roast it or even pickle it. All likely much healthier options to utilize this organic, homegrown zucchini fresh from the garden. The very first recipe…
Philip came running into the house saying the bees were going crazy. He retrieved his phone and went running outside. I followed to see what was going on and was blown away by the tornado of honeybees that was forming in our backyard. Worse yet, the bees were on a mass exodus out of our…
We are thrilled to announce that two new Queens have hatched in the Kowalski Apiary! We had two queen-less colonies. The feral hive of bees that we extracted from the Rosin family home (link below). As well as one of our initial hives that we split were both queenless hives. The hives contained Queen cells…
