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What We Do

HELPING BEE HOBBIESTS AND HONEY LOVERS

RAISING A HEALTHY HIVE

For gardens and farms. Thanks to bees we can enjoy a range of foods from apples and pears to coffee and vanilla. And if you are wearing cotton, that’s because the cotton plant your threads came from was pollinated on a farm.

We need bees. We may take them and other pollinators like butterflies and hoverflies for granted, but they’re vital to stable, healthy food supplies and key to the varied, colorful and nutritious diets we need (and have come to expect).

HONEY HARVESTING

Bees are perfectly adapted to pollinate, helping plants grow, breed and produce food. They do so by transferring pollen between flowering plants and therefore keeping the cycle of life turning.

SWARM REMOVAL

How do you get rid of a swarm of bees naturally?

Mix equal parts vinegar and water and place the mixture in a spray bottle. At night, spray the mixture on the nest, but be sure to wear protective clothing and beware of agitated bees. This mixture is lethal to the bees, and the process may have to be repeated to remove the entire swarm.

HIVE RELOCATION

How to Move a Beehive

If you’ve determined that you must move you hive, there are some important steps that must be taken to ensure that move occurs with the least damage and the entire bee colony moves with the hive.
Make sure the hive will be moved less than three feet or more than two miles

Follow the site selection process outlined in our article “Installing and preparing your beehive”

Wait till after dark before moving bees, if possible. This will ensure that all the bees who were out foraging during the day are at home and will move with the colony. If you cannot move the hive after dark, the prep work for moving it listed in the following steps must still be done after sunset and the hive moved as quickly as possible after sunrise.

After all the bees have arrived home, block the entrance to the hive in such a manner that still allows airflow. Wrapping the hive in a material such as tulle is one effective way to do this.

Keep the hive as level as possible to avoid damage. If the hive is being moved within the same bee yard, carefully walk it to the new location. If it’s being moved any distance, carefully, and as levelly as possible, load the hive on to a pickup truck or other open vehicle appropriately sized to hold the full length of the hive(s). For upright hives such as Langstroth and Warre, this is fairly easy. For horizontal hives such as top bar, this is a bit more challenging.

When you arrive at the new location, carefully unload the hive, again keeping it as level as possible, and place it in its new permanent spot.

Remove the entry block. If you used tulle, completely unwrap the hive. When the bees leave the hive now, they will recognize that it’s in a different location and record the new GPS coordinates. If it’s been moved less than three feet, the bees will not notice a difference.

Leave the hive alone for a few days to a week. This will give the bees time to clean up any comb or honey that was damaged in the moving process and feel comfortable in their new environs.

Resume hive inspections and other management techniques you employ as normal.

HIVE MAINTENANCE

The vast majority of plants we need for food rely on pollination, especially by bees: from almonds and vanilla to apples and squash. Bees also pollinate around 80% of wildflowers in Europe, so our countryside would be far less interesting and beautiful without them.

HELPING BEES IN TROUBLE

There’s growing public and political concern at bee decline across the world. This decline is caused by a combination of stresses – from loss of habitat and food sources to exposure to pesticides and the effects of climate breakdown.

More than ever before, we need to recognise the importance of bees to nature and to our lives. And we need to turn that into action to ensure they don’t just survive but thriv

RENTING BEE HIVES

Call us to rent Bee Hives and enrich your environment with pollinators.