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Hosting bees – photo essay

By

Tara Klager

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Published: November 17, 2022

The bees arrived June 28, and a flat-deck on the truck was stacked high with honey supers and bottom brood boxes. The bees began to find their way out through small gaps as soon as the truck stopped. The hives were set up on pallets and surrounded by a 10,000 volt electric fence to dissuade curious wildlife from further investigation. | Tara Klager photo

The bees arrived June 28, and a flat-deck on the truck was stacked high with honey supers and bottom brood boxes. The bees began to find their way out through small gaps as soon as the truck stopped. The hives were set up on pallets and surrounded by a 10,000 volt electric fence to dissuade curious wildlife from further investigation. | Tara Klager photo

Providence Lane Homestead near Cochrane, Alta., allowed Fallentimber Meadery of Water Valley, Alta., to keep bee hives on the farm this summer. Here’s a look at how it went. | Tara Klager photos

New queens arrived in early July. Each queen cage holds a queen and its attendants — or court — of workers. If members of the hive accept their new queen, it will be fed by the bees before it takes its mating flight. If they don’t, the hive may kill the queen or drive it out and raise its own. | Tara Klager photo

Introducing new queens is a straightforward process. Each cage needs to be pushed down between the brood frames, where the queen will eventually lay its eggs and the workers will tend and care for them. The queen is kept to the bottom of the hive by a “queen excluder,” a layer between the brood box and honey supers that has gaps too small for the queen to fit through while allowing workers to move back and forth. This is to keep brood and honey separate, which makes honey harvest easier. | Tara Klager photo

The hives did well over the season, although the project did experience set-backs, including three bear visits that scattered frames, supers and brood boxes throughout the enclosure, even with the electric fence. At peak honey flow, around 500,000 bees lived in 24 hives with a harvest of 100 pounds of honey, except for what the bears got, of course. | Tara Klager photo

The bees were given a couple of days to get settled before the hives were opened to see how the colonies were doing. No one knew what to expect because the farm didn’t have a lot of flowering crops around, and thanks to a long, cold spring, the bees had missed the first flush of dandelion blooms. However, the hives were busy and healthy and seemed to be finding their way around the property. | Tara Klager photo