honeybees

For the first time in Old Blue history, we will be selling honeybee colonies to the wider public this spring. If you’ve been considering getting one or more hives, now is the time to preorder your bees. Here’s our schedule and offerings: (April 1) 5-Frame Nuc with Anarchy Apiaries Queen or Overwintered Old Blue Queen […]

{ 2 comments }

For the last four years, Henry has been adding to and selecting from his pool of honeybee genetics all originating from feral, Pacific Northwest-adapted colonies. In order to propagate those genetics as well as maintain and increase his hive numbers, he started grafting his own queens last year. Grafting queens takes a lot of time, […]

{ 7 comments }

Henry’s bees are finally home again after more than two months in California. (More about preparing them for almond pollination here and here.) Henry’s beekeeper/truck driver friend hauled them back north on Sunday, and Henry unloaded them in a local holding yard. Overall, they look really really good. Henry spent most of the day on Monday and Tuesday working […]

{ 10 comments }

For most of the year, Henry maintains apiaries of 20 to 30 hives in relatively remote locations in the Coast Range. He decides on ecologically appropriate numbers for each yard by assessing the nectar and pollen resources available at any given time, and he’s careful not to exceed the carrying capacity of the area, especially […]

{ 8 comments }

As things warm up around here, Henry’s been starting to schedule 2013 honeybee extractions. (I’m using the term “honeybee extraction” in this post to mean the act of removing unwanted honeybees that are living on their own in people’s barns, garages, rotten trees, etc.) The next month  and a half or so is the best […]

{ 12 comments }

Comb

March 1, 2013 · 10 comments

Honeybee’s comb is about the coolest stuff ever. It’s beautiful, functional, symmetrical, and it smells good to boot. Comb is also a wonderfully multipurpose substance. It provides structure for a hive, the right nooks and conditions for rearing brood, and storage space for pollen and of course, honey. Bees have four pairs of glands on their […]

{ 10 comments }

Another Swarm

July 23, 2012 · 12 comments

Around 5 PM last night, Henry and I were hanging out in the driveway talking when he suddenly stopped and started looking around. It didn’t take but a minute for him to locate small swarm of honeybees. I had been hearing a buzzing in my subconscious, too, but had ignored it because there’s always a lot […]

{ 12 comments }

I was at home with kids about a week and a half ago when around 1:00 in the afternoon, I started hearing a loud buzzing. I’ve seen and heard enough honeybee swarms in my day (including this one) to know right off that I was hearing bees on the move. I ran up to the […]

{ 7 comments }

Bee Tree

January 13, 2012 · 5 comments

Last Thursday, Henry got a call in the early afternoon from a contact (Wade) who works at the Thompson Sortyard (a distribution center where logs come in from the woods, are graded, get auctioned off, and then get trucked out to their final destinations). Apparently, Wade had been running a specially designed forestry excavator with […]

{ 5 comments }