It's official: I'm an urban beekeeper!

It's likely you've been wondering what been going on with my beekeeping (since January was my first and only blog so far). Well...I've been doing lots to get ready for today.
For the 2nd year, I attended the Bluegrass Beekeeping School held at KSU (March) .http://www.kyagr.com/statevet/bees/09BGBKSchool.htm

I've been connecting with local KY beekeepers, and attended the winter Beekeeping Association meeting. http://www.kyanabees.com/

Best of all, Foxhollow has been hosting what are hopefully monthly 'gatherings' of beekeepers, led by Richard Hosey of Hosey Honey in Midway, Kentucky. It's a group of KY beekeepers who are interested in learning and using more natural methods of beekeeping - and espcially focused on biodynamic methods of beekeeping.

More on biodynamic beekeeping later...I could on and on about it. For now, it's enough to know that Gunther Hauk led a workshop last year that Richard Hosey and I both attended at Foxhollow. Mr. Hosey has decades of experience working with bees. I am in my second year. We are both big fans of Gunther Hauk, though, and believe that he teaches some of the methods that will be critical to the survival of bees.

More about Gunther Hauk here: http://www.spikenardfarm.org/index.shtml

So back to TODAY! Rich (my husband) and I have been working on our little backyard, getting it ready for the hive. Rich had a fence put up along the back alley, so it fairly hidden and protected. He prepped the soil, and I planted ground cover including wooley thyme and creeping thyme. These will be great groundcovers surrounding the hive, so we don't have to worry about mowing.

This afternoon we drove the hour to Midway to pick up the 'nuc' (nucleus hive) from Mr. Hosey. A nuc a great starter hive, consisting of 4 or so frames of bees, their queen, some brood, honey, pollen, etc. It's a stronger start to a new hive, as it has all of the natural parts of the hive.

We put the nuc in my car's trunk, and only had about 6 bees get into the back seat area of the car on the way home. They just buzzed around the back window and didn't bother us at all.

I installed the bees into their new hive by taking out each frame of bees from the nuc box and placing them into the actual brood box. Rich came to get an up close look at the frames while I was holding them to try and find the queen (didn't see her).

It was about 4pm this afternoon when I was done putting the bees in their new hive. Surprisingly, after about 20 or so minutes of a few of them flying around outside the hive, they all seemed to have gone in the hive. Rich and I sat for a little bit and watched them (he brought a chair out and sat about 5 feet away, where we watched the activity at the entrance to the hive. Now, they are in the hive for the night, and are very quiet.

Two notes: 1. I had on my full gear, which is a windbreaker, straps around my pant legs (jeans), my hat and veil, and gloves. By the end of working with them today, I felt like I didn't really need any of it, but it does help with the confidence of not worrying about getting stung.

2. Sorry there are no pics. We couldn't find the camera - but I'll post some photos soon.

More more more to come...!