Yes, my book has been published. I self published so it is only available through me. I will eventually put it for sale on this site, but for now, I am doing local speaking engagements to promote the book.
As for Amazon…..I might sell it there, but not for a while.
It is March 2025 here in the South. That means that the Red Maples are blooming and the hives are building up. That means, splitting the hive (if you have luck with that) or letting them swarm. I prefer the latter as the Bees know what they are doing. They divide the hive perfectly with workers, some drones and, of course, the old Queen. A swarm trap is worth it’s weight in gold! That way you can let the bees do what they need to do and the swarm does it all for you.
A story from a student of mine. He has one hive that he acquired from my swarms in 2024. The hive was healthy and full of bees going into the Spring. We did an inspection a couple of weeks ago and there were no swarm cells, but a couple of days ago, they Swarmed!!
I taught my student about the metal on metal trick and MAN did it work! They were all up in the air and he was pretty sure they were about to take off to parts unknown. He started banging the metal on metal and they immediately came from high in the sky and landed on the ground, almost right next to the old hive.
They landed on a bag of garden soil that was laying on the ground. I was scratching me head as to how to get them in a hive. I could not pick up the bag and dump it in the hive as there was a lot of dirt that would also go into the hive.
I has sprayed all of the old comb frames with “Swarm Commander”. I cocked the inner cover a little so that the foragers would check out the hive. I also pulled the bag of soil closer to the hive so that they could all smell the Swarm Commander. They were checking out the hive, while I was poking through the pile of bees trying to find the queen. In a split second, the queen must have gone into the hive as ALL of the bees stared marching into the hive. I was thrilled that this worked.
My Student was grinning Ear to Ear!!!!!
So now my student has 2 hives. This one was pretty easy and he learned a lot. We let him have the easy one first. We will wait for the difficult ones later when he has a bit more experience.
Until Next Month
NAMASTE’
