A new year filled with new possibilities

 Happy New Year everyone. I am a little late, as it is now almost the end of January. Winter has been kind to us so far. Hardly any snow and the temperatures have been fairly mild. But we all know how nasty and mean February can be at times....so I am not letting down my guard yet.

So what's new for us this year?

In December, I was asked if I would like to participate in a data collecting project with our bees. BC Honey Producers have partnered up with BroodMinder to study how honey bees live and how they survive the winter. The project is huge, with equipment set up in hives all over the world. There are 3 sensors, 2 are placed inside the hive which read temperature and humidity and a scale that sits under the hive. I didn't get my equipment until the first week of  Dec so the only sensor I could install was the scale, which sits under the hive. Once a week (or more), I would take my IPad over to the bee yard and download the data, then head back to the house and upload it to the BroodMinder page. It was take that data and put it on a graph. See below. The scale was installed on the 7th of Dec, so you can see once the hive sits on top of it it went up to around 200lbs. The increase in weight shortly after we installed it was due to snow on top of the hive. The lower graph shows the  outside air temperature and the temperature right under the scale. It was really fun to watch and i can hardly wait until Spring to get the 2 other sensors installed inside the hive. As winter goes on, you can watch the weight go down as the bees stores diminish. Its a very cool project.

I have my fingers crossed that our bees survive the winter and come out strong in the spring. If so I will really be in need for doing a bunch of splits. So once the weather improves, I will need to start putting boxes and frames together and get them painted. 

Which leads me to my next project for 2021;

I am hoping to try my hand at Queen Rearing. It can be hard to get queens sent to me since living where we do, our mail only comes 3 times a week. So I decided to try and  make my own. I have most of all i need to start (except knowledge) but i also will need Mother Nature to provide good weather when we need it. Once the new queens hatch, the weather needs to be nice so they can go on their maiden flights to get bred. So nice weather, lots of Drones and a bit of luck the Queen finds her way back without getting eaten by a bird or getting lost. So we will see how that goes. 

Anyways, nothing much happening right now in the bee yard. I seen a bee come out of the hive and I tried to convince her to go back inside, but she flew away. Sadly she probably didn't make it back. 

Well I better go read up on Queen Rearing and figure out if this is something I am capable of doing. I hope everyone is having a good winter. Stay safe and we will chat again soon.