State Fair

 We extracted 6 frames of honey so, I could enter it in the fair.  We drove to the fair grounds and entered 6 jars of honey and a picture I took of bees.  My honey took 1st in the Junior White Liquid Honey section.  My picture took 2nd in the bee photo junior section.  Thank you Furchner's for taking the pictures and letting me know the results.  We will extract all the remaining honey in a few weeks.

Farside Cartoon

Complements of Carl:

Mite Control and Busy Bees

Carl Noot and Dad helping me with the bees.  We added two Hopguard strips into each of the deep hives.  We will do the same thing for the next two weeks.  Carl and his family were up for the weekend and helped us out.

Carl, Dad, and me putting hopguard strips in.

Adding two more supers.

Added supers and strapped down the hive.

After we added two more supers the hive was getting really tall.  Dad strapped down the hive in case a storm comes through.  We will probably start collecting the honey in the next few weeks.

August 3rd

The bees have been hanging out by the pool and on the filter.  The bees use the water to mix with the honey and cool their hive.  We still swim in the pool because they don't both us.

Bees getting water that drips from the sand filter

The bees in the smaller hive were hanging out by the entrance.  They do this to keep the hive cool.

Bees at the entrance

Close up of some bees

Just hanging out

The two hives from our new Bee Cam that we put up.

Later today we are going to treat for varroa mites.  We plan to use Hopguard because we don't need to wear a respirator to use it.  It also doesn't mess up the honey.  We will need to do the treatment every week for three weeks.  The mites don't kill the bees but they weaken the bees and they are more likely to get diseases.  Also by treating now the bees will have a couple of cycles of healthy brood with less varroa mites.  That should make it more likely that they will survive over the winter.

I also earned my Insect Study Merit badge last Tuesday.  There were a bunch of requirements I had to do.  One of the requirements was to observe a beehive or an ant colony.  I also had to make a scrapbook of different insects I saw.  I learned a lot about bees and other insects. Like the order for bees ants and wasps is Hymenoptera.

Insect Study Merit Badge

Congratulations Zander on completing the requirements for the Insect Study merit badge!