Back to seasonal weather, for us that means nights below zero and days of not more then plus ten degrees centigrade, this means I am stuck working on equipment most of the time, and I have a lot of equipment to build. These are my newest frames I built, the bottom corners are finger jointed to make my life harder (and for durability), finger joints are a lot tougher then butt joints, the real test will be seen in use. I built about one hundred ten frames almost enough for fifteen of my warre box's (eight frames per box). I actually had enough scrap wood for all those frames. Details on their construction and dimensions are posted in my "warre hive design" section (once I get it online).

Here you can see how I waxed the starter spline of wood that gets glued into the saw kref of the top bar. I have yet to see how this will work, it should work at least as well as my cardboard starter strips with the exception of not being chewable by the bees. I cut the splines myself, I wanted to try this at least once since popsicle sticks work just as well. The problem with cutting those splines is they are 10mm tall and the thickness of a saw blade so I have to plane a 22mm board down to 10mm (50% of board gets turned into shavings) then I cut that 10mm board into strips (another 50% sawdust conversion) so I turn 75% of that 22mm thick board into sawdust! I suppose I could skip the planing step and split the resulting sticks for a 50% loss instead of 75%. It was just an experiment though.

I have been watching for colts foot since early march, I found them today, march 20th the first day of spring, feels more like summer with temperatures at 25 degrees, supposed to get to 29 this week. My bees are trucking in loads of pollen. I'm sure its pollen now since it is all the same color.


Here you can see five bees with full pollen baskets, the focus is not the best since they don't waste time crawling around on the hive, making photography a click and pray situation.

This must be what all those gals are asking, so where are they? I began seeing pollen coming into my hives on the 14th of march! That's about four weeks earlier then I have seen before, usually we see pollen the middle of April, this year march is almost like June so warm, yippee! I was wondering if it might be saw dust or seed dust, bees will pick that up too, if they can not find any nectar. I had to remove twenty or so bees from our bird feeder the other day,  doing just this, they had become stuck inside.


This is a close up of some of the pollen I gathered from under a few hives, It smears like pollen and not like wood dust, tastes sweet too, I don't think wood dust or seed dust is sweet, plus I saw a few hives fanning at the end of the day, I don't think it is hot enough yet for them to be purely cooling the hive. All speculation of course until I see some flowers.

I was so excited today, I have been saving a couple frames of honey for when my supply runs out. Whats to exciting is once I got around to crushing the first frame all the honey looked brand new just like it did last year I was expecting it to be partially crystallised since the leftover liquid honey I have from the same batch is almost like butter now. And this is the same hive and the same box as the aforementioned honey!

I was wondering how I was going to store all the honey my bees produce, I think this is a good solution just to leave it in boxs until I can crush some to sell as liquid honey, that way my stock is extremely flexible. I wont just have liquid or comb honey I can have either up to the total amount in storage.

This is what the crystallised honey looks like.

It is still to cold to check my hives for excesses honey this is a nice little treat though, defiantly tastes better from a comb!

Well the hives are still doing well, still to cold to do an inspection (at the moment its 10c), I generally wont open a hive until we are well into a nectar flow, at this rate that might be the end of march who knows.

It is looking good though I should be able to do a few divisions this year since I have strong healthy hives, even hive #1 is still kicking (late cut-out last year).


She came over to say hello!

If you are standing close enough to a hives often a few bees will think you look like a nice place to rest and warm up, so you get visitors.