tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36935067973210918202024-10-19T11:00:45.470-07:00This is a blog about beginning beekeeping the natural way. This is essentially beekeeping without medication or pesticides, and relies on the bees' own health to deal with any problems that may arise.Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.comBlogger44125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-86273843305546683382011-12-27T14:32:00.000-07:002011-12-27T14:32:18.739-07:00

The video linked was shown at a TED conference. TED is an organization that highlights a number of different things, mostly of a scientific nature but also often of philisophical or humanitarian view points. Louis Scwhartzberg put together an film called "The Wings of Life" (click here to view the full video and read the attached blog from http://www.ted.com/). As I watched a shot of&

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-74235285976145692382011-09-25T16:27:00.000-07:002011-09-25T16:27:08.408-07:00

As a writer-kinda-guy, I follow many of the quirks that writers tend to follow. One of these quirks is when I would rather be writing I find myself in a position where I can't (like I'm at work on the phone with someone I would rather not be talking to). Or, when I could be writing, I find myself distracting myself from writing (like right now I have YouTube videos of a band I loved as

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-17147940288869169792011-07-09T15:58:00.000-07:002011-07-09T15:58:33.602-07:00

We've had a couple of really heavy rain storms the last few days - something of a blessing in semi-arid Colorado! The moisture will give a nice midseason boost to the flowers and that will surely help the bees. I inspected our Strasburg hives this morning and they are coming along nicely. All three have small but strong populations and queens that are laying eggs. Plenty of brood in all

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-75519484630989292732011-06-19T14:19:00.000-07:002011-06-19T14:19:26.006-07:00

A few weeks ago an apiarist from France commented on my article, "A Call to Organic Beekeeping." I was astounded that we might have had an international audience for our little blog. But I didn't realize how international we had become until I looked at the stats just now. People from nine other countries, including India and China, have taken at least a peak at A Natural Beekeeping

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A week and a bit ago (the last weekend of May), John and I went out to Farmer Katy's to split the Italian and Sicilian hives . Side by side splits are an incredibly easy way (in theory) of increasing your apiary numbers. It sounds just like it is: you take the top hive body off of a hive and put it to the side of the bottom, add another hive body to the top of each and, viola, you have two hives

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Yesterday my "Call to Organic Beekeeping" article was commented on by Jan Michael of the rucher école Villa le Bosquet (rucher école is French for bee school) in France. Jan shared a link to a YouTube video about his school: http://youtu.be/mYwPAIKZNGA. While he's hoping to get clips in English and German soon, the video is worth watching (especially if you're fluent in French - for which

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-78233836679324998822011-05-24T19:11:00.002-07:002011-05-24T19:49:12.240-07:00

 The swarm Bob collected on Sunday     This last week was rather exciting. We learned that Beth and Kent’s house acts as a swarm attractor and that the three clusters we collected were likely not from the same swarm, but rather were virgin queen swarms. As I mentioned in the previous blog, we captured a swarm on Beth and Kent’s backyard awning last Thursday (their

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-80873927108152136172011-05-24T19:06:00.001-07:002011-06-05T13:45:14.781-07:00

Last Thursday John and I rescued a small swarm of bees a friend of his had spotted in a neighbor’s yard. I say rescued because their ranks appeared decimated by the cold and rain. We found them on the side of an awning over a back porch in two small clusters. The smallest had already succumbed completely to the cold (or so we thought…), but the other (about the size of two softballs) showed some

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-63469786973194562062011-05-15T07:54:00.001-07:002011-05-15T08:01:57.890-07:00

Colorado usually sports well over 300 days of sunshine every year, making us one of the sunniest states in the nation, if not the sunniest (if you're reading this from another state and are thinking about moving here - do realize that it snows even when it's sunny...really! I wouldn't lie to you to keep you out of my birth state. And when they say Denver is a cow town, it's true: traffic can

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-5990885030863869992011-04-17T17:26:00.001-07:002011-04-18T06:40:43.998-07:00

 One of MANY Sicilians very annoyed at me - notice how she's drilling straight in for my eye!   When a bee finds its way up a beekeeper's pant leg, it will end badly for the bee, the keeper or both. I found that out the hard way yesterday. As I was ticking off her sisters (see above), one found the chink in my armor. The problem with a bee in your pants is that the only way to get

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-44135304092224391922011-04-08T07:08:00.000-07:002011-04-08T07:08:34.321-07:00

...really! I'm just about finished reading a book by Stepehn Buchman called Letters From the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind. It's a decent book covering ancient honey hunting, Mayan stingless honey bee beekeeping, medicinal use of honey and much more. Buchman also includes a chapter on cooking with honey. Cooking and eating is near and dear to me as I'm a bit of a

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-82165424353633157732011-04-07T07:24:00.000-07:002011-04-07T07:24:48.476-07:00

 The girls building on a foundationless frame. They make short work of seamlessly connecting those lobes.  In my last post I hinted at something that is widely becoming important in the natural beekeeping movement: small cells. First, a definition: foundation is a plastic or wax sheet that is imprinted with hexagon patterns and inserted in the frame. The idea is to quicken the

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After putting together another hive for when when we split our current hives in a few weeks, John and family and I headed out to Katy Vincent's organic farm out in Strasburg to do an inspection. John met Katy trying to figure out sources to get better meats to eat - specifically non-hormoned, non-antibiotic, free range livestock. They bought a half pig from Katy last year and really enjoyed it.

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-82943664655154410372011-03-31T14:02:00.002-07:002011-04-05T07:50:27.536-07:00

 As Bob mentioned I am in the 'never ever use' camp, I think I should make a statement as to why I am personally against ever using antibiotics for bees; They don’t always work They are not some ‘magic bullet’ that makes everything in the hive better, they only treat bacterial diseases like foulbrood and possibly nosema., and there are a whole host of other non bacterial diseases

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-60674190475468421942011-03-31T12:50:00.001-07:002011-04-05T07:59:38.136-07:00

I was just reading Dennis Murrell's blog "Bee Natural," linked above and in our blog list. First, a note for Dennis: I am devastated to hear about your hive losses and hope you can recover and do it well! Thank you for posting your insights on the issue of virus overload - hopefully folks will learn from them! The particular blog article I'm referring to is Dennis' reflections on what

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  Solid Bottom Board with entrance reducer - as it's name implies, the bottom boards are the base for the rest of the hive  With the first inspection of the season, we found that the underside of the cover of the Sicilian Beehive was damp and peeling. We assume that this was caused by a build up of excessive condensation during the winter. However, the lid of the Italian hive showed no

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-85674865427487216842011-03-29T07:35:00.001-07:002011-03-29T07:39:02.589-07:00

A couple of posts ago, I basically excoriated the beekeeping industry for practices that hurt bees and that these practices contribute solely to CCD. That is a bit unfair as there are other factors to consider. Migratory beekeeping has been happening almost as long as humans have kept bees. Egyptians put hives on barges and coasted them up and down the Nile. Other peoples have strapped them to

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Today is the first full day of spring, and I am ecstatic that it has arrived! John and I showed winter out the door with our first inspection of the hives. I must say, they look lovely. The number of bees surprised me as I would have expected it to be a bit of a slower build up. To my mind, the population looked equal to, if not greater than, what we started with from the nucs last year

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Some of the inspiration for posts comes from email threads John and I have. That's where this one comes from. If we were to seek "true" USDA organic certification, we'd run into a few problems. First off, everything inserted into the hive, whether sugar or probiotic supplement or smoke from the smoker, would have to be documented. I'm not saying we're lazy beekeepers, but this just isn't us

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-61179827953041528112011-03-14T18:51:00.001-07:002011-03-14T18:52:28.060-07:00

I observed a tree full of bees in the street next to ours. Suprised me to see bee foraging this early. I think the tree is a type of Maple ( I will confirm later in the season when leaves appear ). Not sure if they were our bees , but a quick look at our hives showed they were coming and going in large numbers.

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Sometime in 2006 I heard about Collany Collapse Disorder - the bees in thousands of hives across the globe just seemed to disappear - and figured it was another fearmongering tactic by left wing eco-Nazis bent on destroying the economy (no, I'm not a fan of Al Gore, but that's an argument for another day). I was wrong. I started paying attention to my neighborhood butterfly

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I'm on a mailing list for a beekeeping club here in Colorado and the hot topic in the last week has been late winter or early spring feeding. There's a bit of a joke that if you ask two beekeepers a question, you'll get three answers, and spring feeding fits that well. Beekeepers get worried this time of year as they dread that their bees didn't store enough honey to make it through the winter.

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-42435602719614975382010-12-15T10:49:00.000-07:002010-12-15T10:49:34.756-07:00

I get this question quite a bit, so I thought I'd give a quick answer.  Many insects die in the late fall, leaving eggs buried in the ground or encased in some protective covering to perpetuate the species.  Others, like the infamous and devastating pine beetle here in Colorado, continue to live on in the tree it is inhabiting, barely restraining its life cycle.  Bees are somewhat

Bob Nelson and John Rodgershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14349716406727250510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693506797321091820.post-7884146181747838462010-11-13T10:01:00.000-07:002010-11-13T10:01:26.649-07:00

The season went well!  Two out of our three hives survived, flourished even.  The Carniolans completely disappeared at the last inspection we did of them.  When I carcked open the hive, all I found was a couple of bees scraping the last drops of honey or bits of bee bread (a pollen-honey mixture that the bees use for protein storage), a couple of earwigs that quickly met their

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A week after the fact, let's talk about the second harvest.  John and I were both excited and apprehensive about pulling the honey out of this set of supers.  This hive houses our Sicilians, after all!  For those of you just joining this blog, the Sicilians came to us as a replacement hive for our queenless Carniolans.  They've been productive and they've done what bees do,

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