Our hive arrives and is nestled into our backyard.
My husband, Marty and I decided to take a stab at bee keeping with help from Justin Sofio, Founder and President of Youth Bee Works. This spring Justin arrived with the hive, and is sponsoring and maintaining it in our backyard. If you haven’t heard of Justin and his non-profit here’s a brief intro. Youth Bee Works is spreading the wonder of honey bees by educating, training and bringing awareness to people of all ages. Justin especially enjoys meeting with youth, sharing the importance of honey bees and how they are essential to our environment and food industry.
The queen bee arrived in April along with 15,000 of her drones (males) and worker bees (females). The hive will grow to 6 feet tall and have 60,000 bees by mid-summer! It will produce 20-30 pounds of honey which we will be able to share.
We have planted perennials and flowers in our yard that we think the bees will like. And, even if we don’t have every flower they prefer the bees will travel to other gardens for variety. Did you know that honey bees travel approximately a 2 mile radius of the hive? They visit 50-100 flowers during each collection trip to get nectar.
Hoping our hundreds of bees will enjoy the “taste” of the flowers we planted for them.
Bees must collect nectar from about 2 million flowers to make just 1 pound of honey. The honey we collect come from their sampling of our neighborhood’s flowers and trees. We will provide the honey, and our neighbors have promised to bring the biscuits and scones!
Justin is suited up and is attending to our bees.
Seems the whole family is enjoying our new adventure. Here’s the name, Truhley Gold and the graphic that our daughter-in-law designed for our honey.
We can’t wait to share our honey with our family, friends, and neighbors.