2011 year in brief

Due to a crazy year starting a farm and also finding a new job my beekeeping records and especially this blog have not been adequately updated.  I thought I'd do a post now that things are settling down to summarize the year, especially the developments/differences from last year.

It was a super wet spring so the spring flow was late, but we had plenty of rain all summer so there was essentially no dearth.  Brief review of this year:

- lost one of two colonies over the winter
- installed three packages into new equipment I assembled and painted (April)
- did two late spring splits into nucleus hives (nucs) (May-June)
- encouraged raising of three new queens (for the two splits and requeening the overwintered hive which had a 3 year old queen) (May-June)
- split a weak colony and divided the bees to be combined into two slightly weak hives. (Hive 4 was split and combined with hives N1 and N2) (yesterday)

I will hopefully be doing some fall extracting by the end of the month.  I had one hive that just went crazy building comb in the spring and they have 4 supers on the hive even after doing a split!  I also plan on feeding any colonies that are low on food going into Nov.

I need to find out a better way keep records.  I may do a single post for each hive next year and just log each record with an update to each post.  The way I did it in 2010 did not scale.