Our Bees In The Winter

The bees seem to be doing well so far this winter and even with a covering of snow, as you can see from this picture, they keep themselves nice and warm. They snuggle up together, all 30,000 or so of them., The ones in the center move to the outer edge and work their way towards the center again, that way everyone stays warm even when it is really cold outside. On days when the sun is out and it is warm enough for them to go out for a bit, they are doing housework and cleaning up the hive by removing dead bees and taking them outside. The bees that have this job are the mortician bees.

Julie Denison, Associate Broker

Bees In Bed for Winter

This will be our first winter with the bees and I am hoping to see their smiling faces next April when we open up the hive to for the first time since the fall. With the major wind storm that was forecasted for Thursday, December 1, I became concerned that the top would fly off and the girls would freeze so I tied it down. It is now covered with 2 inches of snow, a nice blanket I am sure. It is kind of white on white but here is a picture of the hive in the snow. Julie Denison, Associate Broker

Julie, Tracy and the Bees

My daughter, Tracy, and I decided last winter that we wanted to keep bees, so we joined the Albuquerque Beekeepers Association and started learning about them and put an order in for 4 lbs.of bees. Apparently, that is about 4,000 bees and we had decided to use a top bar hive so we had a third partner build the hive and we were off and running. (Although you don't want to run around a bee hive!) Since we started this in one of the worst dry spells we have ever had and the bees did not have enough plant life to work with, we were determined to have a healthy hive. I think that comes under "ignorance is bliss", but onward we went. We learned that we needed to supplement their food with sugar water and have drinking water close by. I proceeded to buy plants that the bees really like, (the hive is at my house, not Tracy's house) in hopes that it would make a difference to their survival. It seemed to work; they have flourished and were doing fine. Then the robber bees arrived and took all their honey! Never heard of such a thing, but we made the entrance smaller and the bees were able to fight off the robbers and we are back to enough honey for the winter, just in time. In a couple of weeks we will not be checking on the bees because of the cold and will not open up the hive until March. More on the bees then. Julie Denison, Associate Broker

Bees on Russian Sage

What a beautiful morning it is in Placitas. I’m looking outside my window and watching the bees working away at the Russian Sage. Every day they go to work gathering up pollen. There must be 20 to 30 of them in the bush outside my office window. Once in awhile a bird or two will land on a branch and sing. It doesn’t bother the bees at all. They just continue to press on with their purpose in life.

~Rhonda Leonard, Qualifying Broker