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Excuse me Sir!

 Not all bees are girl bees.  Each hive will contain a Queen bee, worker bees (aka honey bees) and drone bees.   The drone bees are the boy bees and their sole job is to mate with queen.  They do not gather nectar or pollen.  They also have a relatively short live span - and they don't sting.  They don't even have a stinger. Drones are not popular bees in the hive.  If they don't die while mating with their queen, they are expelled from the hive come fall and left to die.   Drone bees depend on worker bees to feed them too!  I could insert a "typical man" joke here but let's face it - we need our drones bees!  But then again, there is a queen that uses a drone and then he dies - what does that say about the queen?  Things that make you go hmmm....
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Smokin' Hot

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 Yesterday was bee feeding day.  We were a day late but that is ok!  I have mentioned that we have some temperamental bees with an attitude so we decided to bring out the smoker. So why do we smoke our bees?  In the age of consent, it is presumptuous to assume that the bees want to be smoked.  Their body, their choice?!  If you watched a certain Bee Movie, you may have learned that smoking bees is like a drug to them.  In the movie, the bees become docile and pass out as if stoned from smoking too much. But, I am here to teach you that that is NOT the case!  What the smoke actually does is mask the bee phenomes that say "Hey - yo!  Danger Will Robinson!!"  Smoking the bees does NOT - let me repeat - does NOT make my bees more docile.  They don't pass out and act like stoners from old 80's movies.  (Gnarly dude!)  Instead, when we smoke our bees, they get angry!  They fly around and make a loud noise.  Even though they get all riled up, they are away from the hive fram
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Don't bee mean bro!

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*To anyone reading this blog - I am not a professional beekeeper. I don't even play one on t.v. If you opt to take advise from me, do so at your own risk.   Yesterday was our weekly bee feeding. If read my last blog, I mentioned a "super." The easy definition of a "super" is an extra box on top of your beehive use to "gather" honey. Beekeepers will add a queen excluder on top of the bee box before adding the super. The honeybees are small enough to pass through the super and start making honey in the super. The queen can't squeeze her fat bottom past the excluder. I am not body shaming the queen - after all she has to manage the hive, make new baby bees and generally deal with any issues with the hive. So, she is entitled to her crown and to quote the Queen, "fat bottom girls make the rocking world go round!"   After falling into the rabbit hole of beekeeping, I learned that with our Texas heat, you don't want to add a super
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And I'm off!

Hello blogging world! Is this still a thing?! I really am doing this to put all my beekeeping knowledge in one place. We got hee-bee-gee-bees! No really, we got bees. 13 hives to be exact. We have had bees for a year now and I have been helping care for these socialist bugs for the past few months. I buy about 50 - 60 lbs of sugar a week. When it is hot like it has been (6 weeks of 100 degree weather), they get a gallon of sugar water once a week. Once I get my thoughts organized - and trust me, there are a lot of thoughts in there, I will get them. But for now, here is a my fun fact - you add a super when 7/10 frames are full. Stay tuned for more un-bee-lievable stuff!
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