This week has been tough on me. I had to go to town and get some items both for the house and the apiaries. Going to Walmart in this town is a nightmare, at least to me. They have been changing up the display isles and shelves. Where they used to have something, now holds something new. Only in the grocery part of the store, the meat, milk, and frozen coolers are still the same. If you want a certain item, then you have to go down each and every isle and look on all the shelves, and even then, I sometimes overlook the item that I want. All this is to say that it takes me 3-4 hours just to shop a little bit. I am very tired when I get home.

Then I had to go to a little town in Alabama,about 45 minutes away, to a bee meeting just to finish up the last workshop business, and while I was there, they asked me to field some question about managing bees. After the meeting, I was delayed going home because of all the questions one on one. That is okay, but the day was a very long day and I needed to get home to my bed.

The next day, I had to catch up on home work. You know, mow the jungle in the back yard, weedeat the weeds that the mower missed, then pull up all the weeds that were too big for the weedeater.

I am getting ready to take a new beekeeper out to my apiaries in the north part of the county Saturday, and mow more weeds and to number hives. I spent most of yesterday going to several hardware stores to get enough numbers to mark the hives. In this case, I am using metal plates with numbers punched into them so when a hive body needs to be replaced, all I have to do is move the colony into the new box and unscrew the numbers from the old box and screw them onto the new box. The colony is the same, just the wood is replaced.

This way, I can keep records on each colony no matter what box they are in. Records are good to have so you know what has happened to that particular colony over the life of it. When you split it, re-queened, medicated, why, and what the results were. Then you can tell what the weather was like when you did all this. Also, you can know how much honey the colony made, what the amount of propolis each colony produced, how much feeding of honey, syrup, sugar water, and pollen substitute you have fed.

Also, by numbering the hives, when you move them, you don’t have to place them in a certain order to keep them straight, the numbers will be the identifiers.

Now I have to go to sleep so I can get the lawn mower, weedeater, fuel, and another brood box into the truck in the morning. Now you ask me why didn’t I do that tonight? Well, for one thing I was asked to go to a man’s home tonight to collect a colony of bees that he has had for eight years in his back yard. The box is in bad shape and all the duct tape on the truck couldn’t keep the bees inside. They were mad. I didn’t want to make them madder by throwing a lot of equipment into the truck and making them decide that they could fly at night. I will just have to be easy in the morning when I do load the remaining equipment. We will set the colony at the new location and after cleaning the yard, we will transfer them into the new brood box and add a super.

I’ll tell you how it went tomorrow night. Good night.