Category Archives: Beekeeping
Courting Our First Swarm
“Baby come back Any kind of fool could see There was something in everything about you Baby come back You can blame it all on me” ~ Hall and Oats, Baby Come Back As I type this, thousands upon thousands … Continue reading
Our First Ever Spring Hive Check
It’s often said that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. This rings true for us every time we open our hive and even when we’re just sitting nearby watching with wonderment. Though we’re entering our … Continue reading
Posted in Basics, Beekeeping, Chicago
Tagged checker boarding, hive check, inside the hive, lessons learned, pollen, queen excluder, spring, supers, urban beekeeping
4 Comments
A Winter Beard
Our little blog has been dormant for months, but our mighty hive is alive and kicking. Early last September we harvested over twenty pounds of honey, a 225% increase from our first-ever harvest in 2010. We were surprised by the … Continue reading
Posted in Beekeeping, Chicago, History, Uncategorized
Tagged bearding, bees died, harvest, urban beekeeping, winter
2 Comments
A Little Tough Love at the Hive
When we picked up our new bees in late May, Bob the Beeman from Kress Apiary handed us a clear plastic packet containing something that resembled refrigerated pie dough. In fact it contained two formic acid strips. On an earlier … Continue reading
Posted in Beekeeping, Resources, Uncategorized
Tagged Dadant, formic acid, inside the hive, Kress Apiary, tough love, urban beekeeping
1 Comment
With a New Colony Comes New Lessons
When our first colony of bees died this spring, we knew almost immediately that we would start again with a new colony. Though we’d only been at it for a year, we loved beekeeping too much to simply throw in … Continue reading
Our First Colony: The Final Chapter
How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. ~ Carol Sobieski and Thomas Meehan, Annie It’s been two months since we lost our hive. Though I’ve always believed that something good can spring from even … Continue reading
Unsolved Mystery: What Happened to Our Bees?
Our first year as urban beekeepers ended on a sad note: we lost the entire colony. On a recent, warm spring day we opened the silent hive in search of answers. Our investigation was inconclusive, but we ruled out starvation.
Posted in Beekeeping, News
Tagged bees died, inside the hive, urban beekeeping, videos, winter
17 Comments
The Deafening Silence of Our Hive
Because my Sweet Hive friends will understand better than anyone, I wanted to share an excerpt from a piece I recently wrote for chicagoREgen.com titled The Heartbreak of an Urban Beekeeper. When the second warm day of the year arrived … Continue reading
