Beekeeping: Extending the Hive

Cassidy and I went out to my family’s house in Marine-on-St-Croix, about 45 minutes from Minneapolis. The area is surrounded by prairie and forest, and we took our dogs for a long tick-ridden walk on the trails with a stop at the Beehive my mom and her friend started this spring. Photo editorial of Beekeeping and Extending the Hive (putting more frames into the hive, or adding boxes and frames to the hive), with snippets of a wand making shop and nice garden below.

Because of bears in the area, they have the hives secured by electrical wire.

This hive on the left is where the Italian bees are.

This is very cool, and very frightening to someone like me. I am indeed using my 21x zoom whereas my mother is wearing a skirt. No fear.

They are adding additional frames to the hive, so the bees can continue working.

This one is my favorite – this is of the American bees hive and because they overused their frames (I don’t know beekeeping lingo, so bear with me) they started their own.

Another terrifying shot of lots of bees.

The beeswax they pulled out (the one the bees started).

And this concludes the day’s beekeeping work.

Back home in the garage, my brothers were making wands.

He’s telling me about his start up wand making business and the different features of each wand. Later in the day I was thinking about this, and hope he will make me and Frank our own wands as a wedding gift.

This is the community vegetable garden. It has very neat rows of every different kind of vegetable.



Then it was time to find Cassidy and Lily, who were pretty tired and not in the mood for a gal-pal photo, but stayed still long enough to get one decent one.