I got a call from a family who had a wild honey bee hive in the eve of their house! I had no experience removing wild bee hives and the thought of climbing a 10′ ladder and removing the hive myself scared the liven day lights out of me! Especially after seeing how very hot […]
Part 4: Hallelujah, we defeated the Africanized honey bees!
October 21, 2012 By 8 Comments
Wonderful news, we have docile bees! We could have worked our bees without a suit. Gentile well behaved bees is a 180 degree change from our summer with Africanized killer crazy bees. If this is what beekeeping is like, we’ll keep doing it! This is our first year keeping bees. And it’s been a bumpy […]
GNOWFGLINS featured our Farm on “Down Home Farm Tours”!
September 3, 2012 By 2 Comments
One of my favorite website blogs is called GNOWFGLINS with Wardee Harmon. She featured our farm on her recent post, Click HERE to view the post. Wardee has a fabulous cooking eCourse, blog, author of several eBooks and “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fermenting Foods” Amazon.com Widgets
Part 3: Off with her head! The queen is dead in our Africanized honey bee hive!
July 29, 2012 By 7 Comments
Off with her head, the queen is dead!!! Before you read this post, you need to read Part 1 and Part 2 to understand what’s going on in our honey bee yard. The below video explains what happened when we opened the crazy africanized hot honey bee hive! Last weekend, we did the first step in dealing with our […]
Part 2: Our battle plan to deal with our “hot” Africanized bee hive!
July 20, 2012 By 8 Comments
You’re not going to believe this, we’re not going to kill our whole colony of crazy hot Africanized bees. Instead, we’re going to do what all responsible beekeepers and real men and woman do, re-queen! Aaaahhhhh. Yeah. Notice in the above picture, we’re not in the mood to let any bees in our suits… duct […]
Part 1: Disaster strikes new beekeepers in East Texas: Africanized killer bees
July 15, 2012 By 48 Comments
WARNING: Don’t read this if you are looking to start keeping honey bees. We might be done with bees. We’re contemplating knocking over the hive and spraying pesticide in the entrance. Which coming from a girl who really tries do it all ‘NATURAL’ is saying a lot. We have two hives, this spring we started […]
Trouble in the land of milk and honey! One of our bee hives is in distress!
July 1, 2012 By 5 Comments
It’s HOT in Texas right now and there is trouble brewing in one of our two top bar bee hives! This morning Andrew and I went out for our weekly check. We have two top bar bee hives. Both were started with bee packages this spring from a bee breeder in South Texas. Our number […]
Top Bar Beekeeping: First Full Hive Inspection
May 2, 2012 By 3 Comments
It’s been a week since we put our 3 lb bee packages in our Top Bar hives. We’ve been watching them through an observation window and filling their sugar water (which they go through one quart every three days!). Saturday was the big day. We lit the smoker for the first time, put on all […]
Honeybee Swarm Update
May 2, 2012 By 3 Comments
We lost the swarm. This is a picture of what you DO NOT WANT TO SEE. We put the swarm in this box at about 9:00 a.m. Isabella and I took this picture of the box that afternoon at about 3:00 p.m. we thought they were just hot, but they were hot, botthered and about to […]
HEADLINE NEWS! This morning, a wild swarm of honeybees clustered under our mail box!!!!
April 24, 2012 By 4 Comments
On Andrew’s way off to work this morning, he noticed that there was a huge basketball size cluster of bees underneath our mail box! The first thing he thought was “oh know, our bees left the hive!” We all went down to our hives and found that our bees were still there! There was a […]
Top Bar Beekeeping: It’s official, we’re “beekeepers”!
April 21, 2012 By 10 Comments
I got a call this afternoon from the post office, “your bees are here, please come pick them up!” Andrew and I have been planning and anticipating this day for a full year and a half! HOW WE GOT STARTED We’re first time beekeepers, with no experience, zero, zip, none, nada, nil. We have a […]
“Our Natural Life” Interview
April 30, 2011 By 2 Comments
Jon and Cathy Payne with Our Natural Life and Broad River Pastures did a podcast interview with Andrew and I called “Living in the Land of Milk and Honey“. The interview covers discovering the Weston A. Price Foundation and nutrient-dense foods. How we changed our eating and working towards a self-sufficent lifestyle farming in our little heaven on […]
