One of our methods of installing new package bees into a hive, using sugar syrup to distract them and directly releasing the queen.

I suppose it’s probably not a typical problem, but we needed to ‘yak-proof’ our bees this year. Our apiary is in a large pasture with our small herd of Tibetan yak (and one Highland cow), who conveniently discovered that the hives made great scratching posts. To prevent incidents, we decided to build a yak-proof fence […]

Some local beekeepers have been kind enough to organize transport of package bees for everyone in our area. These package bees come from California from large breeding apiaries. Northern climates like ours (Minnesota) are not able to produce new packages with ready-to-go queens this early in the year so they have to come from warmer […]

Spring hive installations 2015 was an incredibly busy year for our fledgling farm! We moved to our new location in April and established our new apiary, built a chicken coop (promptly filling it with chickens), then added heritage turkeys, ducks, geese, pigs, yak, and a highland cow to our small homestead.

If honey is properly ‘cured’ (dehydrated by the bees through wing-fanning to a specific moisture content), it will last indefinitely when stored properly. If the honey is ‘wet’ (more than about 19% moisture content), though, it will ferment. This year, we had quite a bit of wet honey so we decided to try our hands […]

  2014 was a productive year for us, with all seven colonies of bees flourishing and establishing well, building up and preparing well for our long Minnesota winter. We also had our first chance to render extra beeswax (a byproduct of honey harvesting) and make some candles!  Here is a photo of our smoker. We […]

A huge thank you to all of our 2014 Hive Share sponsors, who were a major help in the expansion and running our our apiary this year!  This particular hive was sponsored by Ursula Vernon. The queen was Carniolan and the bees built up slowly but caught up really well by the end of the […]

  Foxfeather preparing to graft bee larvae – part of the process of raising queen bees. Having been pretty enraptured by the bees and really enjoying our apiary, the next logical step for us was to explore the idea of breeding our bees and raising our own queens. Right now we (and most folks in […]

New hive installations   Thanks in large part to our awesome hive share sponsors, we installed seven new colonies of bees in our apiary this spring! 

Extracting Honey In the fall of 2013, we had our first honey harvest!  Here in Minnesota the bees need about 100lbs of excess honey for themselves to get a colony through the winter, and since we don’t feed them sugar syrup or take their own stores away, we don’t get a whole lot of excess. […]