Background

To give you a bit of background, I was born in Vermont, and when I was 10, we moved to South Carolina, and then soon after that Florida. While I was in college, my family moved back to Vermont. When I was a kid, I remember my Dad had bees off and on, and always talked about how his Dad (we call him Pa Pere) had bees for pollination and honey throughout his life. At one time, Pa Pere was the largest honey producer in Vermont. Over the last several years, my Dad has gotten back into beekeeping, and after a couple of years, started building a new hive design. It is square in shape, rather than the rectangular shape of a Langstroth hive. You can follow my Dad's work on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/weepingpinefarm.

Last year, in our backyard garden here in Indiana, we tried to grow pumpkins, and while I know a plant's production depends on many things, we had only one pumpkin (and my husband pollinated the plants with a q-tip when we didn't see any bees). So we decided we had to do something, or we couldn't ever expect to have a couple productive apple trees or any berry bushes in the future. We decided to start a hive in our backyard, and began making plans for it. We built a fence, to use as a wind break, and also to impact the flight pattern of the bees, so they fly higher above the ground when foraging. This way there is less of a chance that they will be in the way of our neighbors during the warmer seasons.

My Dad was very generous, and gave me all the equipment that I would need to start the hive. He would have given me a package of bees also, but the timing didn't work out, and I felt I needed to make some investment into this endeavor. We are starting our square hive with two deep hive bodies, and we have 4 supers, which should be more than enough for the first year. Here's a photo of our hive, with my parents and my children showing it off:

I'm feeding them on top of the inner cover with an empty super to protect the jar(s) of sugar syrup under the outer cover. A few weeks into this new adventure, my Dad suggested that I keep a log of how things went, so I could look back if I had questions or wanted a resource for when I might start another hive in the future.

So, this blog is my new log. I wish I had started it sooner, so I could track how much I fed, and when, in more detail, but this will do for now. From now on, when I feed, I'll record an approximate number of ounces of syrup, so that way I can start to predict, in future years, when the nectar is flowing and when they are taking syrup from the feeder jar(s). Hopefully this blog will also be a resource to other newbies that are starting out on a similar hobby in the future. As time goes on, I'll try to post pictures of my hive, but for now, it's a challenge just to get words typed up, since I also have two young children to look after.