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…
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…
The timing of the extracted bee colony from the Rosin family home was perfect! Since we were scheduled to have our first annual apiary inspection the next day. We were eager to see what the agriculture inspector thought about the colony. The biggest questions, did we extract the queen? Was our colony strong enough to…
In early March Philip responded to a request from a family that had a colony of bees that had taken up residence in the exterior wall of their home. The bees were making their way into the residence through an abandoned cable access point. The homeowner, Rebecca Rosin, was looking for a beekeeper who extracts…
Philip did some hive maintenance to prepare for our upcoming apiary inspection. As always we spend time looking for the queens and check for signs of new eggs. The bees were building their honeycomb in between the two boxes in Hive 1, essentially fusing them together. He cleaned out all the honeycomb built between the…
There are numerous phrases we use in everyday speech that often we don’t fully understand their meaning until we come face to face with their origin. Nitpicking was one of those terms that came to life to me when my family of 5 got infested with lice! Ohhhh how that term brought on all new…
Any of you who have followed us in the past, know we have had gardens the last couple of years. Last year we built the greenhouse and doubled our garden space. 2020 was a year of green beans, canning over 60 pints in addition to all we ate fresh and gave away. 2019 was probably…
