Our bees will be arriving in about a month! The first 2 weekends in May – one weekend for our Russians and one weekend for our Italians.
We were lucky enough to find a local supplier this year for our Italian bees – so that means we don’t have to make a 5 hour drive up to Hackensack with a newborn! I am a very relieved 38 weeks pregnant wife at that one 😉 Our Russian bees are shipped to us and will arrive via mail. That should be an interesting one, as it is our first time getting bees shipped. I have a feeling it will be a very quick transfer as they will need to be fed very quickly -a mixture of a sugary syrup.
We are busy putting together hives and getting prepped to paint them all.
We will have to keep our two kinds of bees separate (we don’t want rouge bees mixing in hives and we also don’t want to tax certain pollination areas), so the Russian bees are actually going on a piece of land a county over to help pollinate a melon field. We are pretty excited to see how that honey turns out!
We also have been trying out making honey mead! Honey mead takes a while to ferment, so after an initial two week fermentation process, we siphoned it into the carboy where it will ferment for about the next 6 months. It has been a learning process for us both, and we were lucky enough to get some help from the experts over at Know-How Brew Shop. They set us up with everything we would need from the 5 gallon bucket, to the carboy to yeast.
We are excited for this spring and all of our new bees to arrive. We should have our first batch of honey in August, so watch for how you can get your hands on some!
