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Tag Archives | beekeeper
HoneyLover of the Month: Roberta
HoneyLover of the Month: ROBERTA
“Beekeeping started out just as way to improve my crops. Seemed easy enough to just get some free bees off a tree limb and stick them in a box and voila, more fruit. Well there was something about my first day that was just magical. I went to watch Kirk do a cutout with someone who had some experience. I came from work and they had gotten most of a very old and big hive out of wall. I got to just watch and learn.
The next door neighbor and her kids were watching from a window and I loved being the person explaining what was happening. Kirk was mentoring, the other beekeeper was learning how to do a cutout, I was just learning how to be around bees and the kids were learning about something so new.
Then Kirk took me to a simple swarm capture and we packaged them up into one of his old nucs and there I was with a new hive. With the swarm, it was just a small cute ball of fuzzy bees. They were gently, buzzing but pretty much content to go wherever we put them. Seemed like an innocent experience.
The excitement of being able to work with these little but powerful creatures took a hold and I had bee fever. I couldn’t get enough cutouts and swarms but then I couldn’t keep them anywhere and that’s how the mentoring started. I loved being able to share a first time cutout or swarm with others. It really felt like giving someone a gift.”
Backwards Beekeepers: Hollywood Hills cut-out
Backwards Beekeepers: Hollywood Hills cut-out
Rob finds the honey.
LA Backwards Beekeeper Roberta writes:
A call to the Bee Rescue Hotline sent us up to the Hollywood Hills to do a cut-out from an exterior garage wall. The homeowner said that the hive had been there for almost 20 years. There had also been two other hives on the property that other Backwards Beekeepers had removed.
Knowing that the hive had been there such a long time, we were surprised to find just one area with brood comb and an equal amount of space for just honey. It was funny how the bees had set up the hive: on the left of one wall stud was the brood and on the right (between the next set of studs) was the honey. There was very little crossover.
This hive was just barely hanging in there. Leah put the brood and bees into Rob’s handmade nucs and brought them to one of her queenless hives.
We checked the hive the next day and there were some bees on the comb, but not many. There were also a bunch of bees left in the wall that didn’t want to go into the nuc box that I had left there, so I’ll need to move them on another night.
—roberta
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Plant an organic garden without the pesticides that harm honeybees!
Provide a water source on your property – bees love clean water to drink!