I’m BACK!! The Bee Lady is back up and running with a BRAND NEW LOOK AND A BRAND NEW WEBSITE!
The Hiatus was from blogging, not from Beekeeping.
2019 was a particularly tough year for me, The Bee Lady. I lost more hives in 2019 than any other of my 10 years of beekeeping. Hives absconded, split did not work out, hive beetles drove the bees out of the hive in mid-winter and one hive swarmed itself to death.
I am left with 2 healthy hives going into 2020, down from 5 in 2019. That is not counting the splits that did not survive (I think due to the terrible heat that the summer of 2019 brought to my North Carolina apiary).
At times during the last year, I wanted to quit, but something made me keep going. If any of you beekeepers have experienced the lost of a hive, you know how deeply it can effect you. It’s like losing a pet. I felt a deep sense of loss and a “what did I do wrong” feeling.
Some of the losses had me scratching my head wondering, what the heck happened and they all just made me very sad.
If you are reading this and are not yet a beekeeper, but want to be, think long and hard about it. You will experience losses of your bees!! There is no getting around that fact in this day and age. Know it and be ready to deal with that before you even start.
I am not wanting to discourage you before you start, but you need to be aware of the terrible plight that has befallen bees and all of our wonderful winged pollinators.
On the other hand, I still get tremendous joy from teaching a class about pollinators to a group of children, gardeners or an individual beekeeper that I am mentoring. That exquisite complexity of the honey bee and their relationship to the flowers that I grow is more than I can describe in words.
This is why I continue……..
ONWARD IN BEEKEEPING IN 2020!
More next month on what is blooming for the bees, but here is a sneak peek at something blooming now.
