A few months ago I decided to build and create two new hives. If you remember last year I only had two and one of them ended up dying out over the brutal cold winter I had. The other survived and ended up being a very strong colony of honey bees.
With two new hives I now had a total of 4 honey bee hives on the homestead. You can tell the difference between the old hive and the new ones via their color. The first two I built and stained myself are the dark ones. The two new hives are the waxed hives you see where they are growing like crazy.
Each year around this time I go out to spin honey which is a bit of a process. I normally dedicate a few hours of the day to it. This time a neighbor wanted to come over and watch how it’s all done. Little did I know when I would go out that day they bees had swarmed and moved to my pear tree (the 4th picture you see here). In order to pull the swarm I brought over a hive box and started dumping bees in trying to get the queen into the box.
I knew the queen was in the box after the bees started to create a train (they follow each other in a line formation) into the box. After they calmed down a bit I ended up removing the one queen from the hive that nearly died off this year and instead used the queen and the bees from the swarm to create a new hive. You can watch all of this in one of my recent vlogs here Huge Honey Bee Swarm
So far the new hive is doing well and I was able to extract a few gallons of honey from the hives. They will now start to rebuild and get ready for the colder winter months.