At long last, I can report good news from the apiary! Both hives are so busy I had to add an extra box apiece. And our basswood tree is blooming this year, so we might actually get to harvest honey despite our spring swarms.

The even better news is that the queen is finally laying in the Langstroth part of our hybrid hive. There's still brood in the Warre box, so I can't complete the transition just yet. But hopefully I'll soon be able to take that top box off and remove it with honey inside.

Tall hives are a good sign, especially when all but one box in each is drawn and in use. I checkerboarded new frames between drawn frames in the Langstroth hive, which seems to be handy for getting the bees to use the new space faster. In the Warre hive, I instead had to put an empty box in the stack second from the bottom. Here's hoping the bees put both annexes to good use soon and keep up the good work.

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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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