Our First Year (2012)
We started with two hives situated between a patch of forest (“The Big Woods”) and one of our crop fields. In the beginning of the season we noticed one colony was beginning to build their honeycomb on frame edges. This would have made their jobs — and ours! — more difficult, so we scraped that part of the comb (aka ‘burr comb’) off the frames. Hopefully this would help them focus their building on the correct part of the frame. The bees did a much better job building new even honeycomb for their brood.
We used the scraping as an opportunity to harvest and sample some of the honey they were producing. Interestingly enough, that sample of honey tasted like mint which happened to be growing near the hives.
No more honey was harvested so the bees could fortify themselves for their first winter. Sadly, both hives experienced colony collapse disorder (CCD) before winter — one hive died out early in the fall while the other collapsed in December. We were not able to determine the cause, but after much research, we decided to make changes for the new bees arriving in the spring.
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