Ever since we split the bees and then dragged the brooder into the apiary, the pasture in question has felt like a mini-metropolis. Well, maybe not so mini. I estimate our two hives together house perhaps 30,000 bees...about the size of my original home town.

More seriously, the foragers in the mother hive are working like crazy, even though the basswood is still in the bud stage. In contrast, the daughter hive appears to be doing nothing...until you peer closely and see workers walking back and forth between hive and feeder, then tap the hive and hear the roar. Some of those nurse bees should graduate into foragers before too long, at which point the daughter hive will also be packing away winter stores.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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