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We drove to a small town outside of Lancaster, PA. to pick our bees up from our friend, John. When we arrived he was busy taping screen over the entrances to the hives. |
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Here are the 6 hives all taped up and ready to roll. The hives in the background are extras he gave us - plus a WHOLE lot of other stuff. |
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Bernie and John pick up the first hive to load in the trailer. |
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They're up on the trailer and headed inside. |
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Here they are walking it in. |
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I was busy loading up the stands during the hive loading procedure, so I didn't get pictures of the whole thing, but at this point in the process there are 6 hives loaded (behind the guys) and John is taking apart a spare one and explaining some things to Bernie in this picture. We ended up with the trailer completely packed with hives and other things John gave us - plus the bed of the pickup full with stands and some other stuff. |
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Since I had to help Bernie unload (this is a-whole-nother story you can read about on the blog), I didn't get any pictures until we had them all unloaded. Not only was I busy, I was shaking WAY to much to even think about trying to steady a camera lens. Did I mention I am absolutely TERRIFIED of bees????? |
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This is a picture of the trailer unloaded - all the stuff to the right is extra stuff John gave us. |
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Here's Bernie, suited up and setting the bees free. Trust me when I tell you they were more than ready. They were really buzzing and fighting against the screen to be free. One of the hives busted through the screen early, and man were they swarming! |
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He's unleashing the last hive in this picture. You can't really see the bees swarming around in this picture, but they were SWARMING! It was a warm day and they were doing a very happy bee dance to be outside that hive! |
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Here's my Bee Master, Bernie. He's cute as a button in that outfit. |
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If you click on this picture to make it bigger, you can see the bees on the front of the hives. I don't think you can actually see them swarming about the hives, but you can trust me that they were! Read the blog if you are interested in the details. |
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12/31/06 - Today we installed the electric fence (solar) around the bee hives. Our main concern is the bears, but we're hoping it will discourage the neighborhood kids from messing around them too. This picture was taken just before the electric fence installation. |
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We got the fence post in. Well, actually, Bernie did. I was very little help - but I stood by him every step of the way for heavens sake! Our ground is HARD and is mostly rock, so poor Bernie had his work cut out for him. |
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Once the posts were in, we installed the insulators - which are the bright yellow things on each of the posts. I was immense help during this process, by the way. We're doing 2 rows of electrice fence, which explains why there are 2 insulators on each post. |
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At this point, we have strung the wire through the insulators on each post. We used 17 guage wire for this project. If you look closely at the right hand side, that post closest to us has the gate handles we installed, so we can easily access the area. |
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Here's Bernie using the Slap Hammer to sink the 6 foot ground rod. This really was a great deal of work, but he got it done! |
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Here he is wrapping the ground wire to the ground rod. We located the ground rod about a foot or so away from the fence. |
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Here it is finished. We located the solar fence controller on the closest fence post on the right of this picture. We tied both of the fence lines together and hooked into the controller. That top line is the ground line. It runs from the left of the picture over to the controller on the right. I discussed this process a little in our blog . |
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02/19/07 - I took this picture just as snow was beginning to fall again. If you click the picture you can actually see the snow flakes falling. I'm really proud of our girls - they are holding up quite well, despite our record breaking cold weather. You can read about how they are surviving the ice/snow/cold on the blog. |
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02/24/07 - Even though it's in the 40's today, a few of the girls were busy cleaning. If you click this picture and make it larger, you can see a few of the gals at the entrace, and a couple of dead bees they've been removing from the hive. |
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02/25/07 - I wonder if the girls were as surprised as we were to wake up to 7 - 8 inches of snow! The bottom entrances were snowed in pretty well. We uncovered them and will head down to check throughout the day. |
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3/23/07 - The bees were out and about on this gorgeous day. If you click on this picture you will see one of our girls on a flower. She is TOO darn cute! I also launched a new website dedicated to our bees. I also put the latest pictures of the bees on the new website. Check it out! |
