I picked up my 4 frame NUC (Nucleus Colony) from an Apiary in the vicinity of Navasota. Quite a crowd on hand for the pick-up date. The bee keepers are a mixed bunch. A grandfather and his grandson, a retired couple form Georgetown adding a third colony to their backyard, several young couples ( FYI – most of the couplse were younger than me!), a young man picking up 5 NUC’s …… beekeeping is alive and well in Texas. I feel like I am doing my little part to address the big problem of the disappearing bees!
“Being part of the bigger picture: Save the bees!
The facts that keeping a hive in the backyard dramatically improves pollination and rewards you with a delicious honey harvest are by themselves good enough reasons to keep bees. But today, the value of keeping bees goes beyond the obvious. In many areas, millions of colonies of wild (or feral) honey bees have been wiped out by urbanization, pesticides, and parasitic mites, devastating the wild honey bee population. When gardeners wonder why they now see fewer and fewer honey bees in their gardens, it’s because of the dramatic decrease in our wild honey bee population. Backyard beekeeping has become vital in our efforts to reestablish lost colonies of bees and offset the natural decrease in pollination by wild bees.” http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/discovering-the-benefits-of-beekeeping.html
The new bees clustered around their frames installed into my hive.
My new hive and the new occupants.
In operation…almost. Restricted entry for a week or two and feeding sugar water until they are well established and filling in most of the bare frames.
TTFN
Bishop
From My Backyard 