You should probably find the biggest bee and kick it's ass right away, just as a message to the other bees, not the queen but the biggest drone.
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I'll bring a suit of armor. :-)
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Very cool Vin, if I had the space and time I'd love to do something similar. I'm always up for a honey/honey bbq sauce trade :-)
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From my as yet very limited understanding of honey bee dynamics, bee keepers are taught to only harvest the excess honey. There's not a "brood hive" and a separate "storage hive" -- if I have two hives, I potentially end up with 2X the honey. I'm nowhere near the point where I want to manage two hives, although some instructors recommend starting out with two because it can be easier to deal with problems in one hive if you have a second. But I'm going with one for the time being. I don't want so many bees that icehog won't set foot in New England much less Mass.
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I like turtles. :-)
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Make sure the bees have plants to do their work on. If all there is around are pine trees; the honey will have a certain taste...
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Vin, before you get too far into this, you might want to verify that you are not allergic to bee stings :-)
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We're quite literally across the street from an apple orchard. :-)

Been stung as recently as last summer. Can't absolutely say it was a honey bee, but I'm not overly worried.
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Here you go ...

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Backyard herfing is better. That way your neighbors won't see Tom's retirement stripper dancing.:-):-)
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Have you seen these hives, Vin?

https://youtu.be/0_pj4cz2VJM
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IPA! :-)

Yay!!

It better be a chick, Jeff. :-)
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Built a hive stand over the weekend from some plans I found online. I'm no carpenter, but the stand is (relatively) stable & the hive fits on it perfectly.

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The honey bees are due on April 10 ...
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Wow! Did not realize people still used corded tools!

:-)
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Cool! Progress is good. Any chance you'll put up a "bee cam" at some point? By that I mean a small camera that sees inside the hive. Something like this but a wider shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_9HZeG97Xg
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I could see doing something outside the hive, but inside the hive would be tricky based on what little I currently know about honey bees to this point and the space (or lack of space) they like to have in the hive.

There's a concept knows as "bee space" which is between 3/8 and a 1/4 inch. If there's more space, the bees build to fill it in, and if there's less, they seal it up with this resin-like substance they produce called propolis. So a camera in the hive has to take bee space into account at a minimum, and I'm not there yet.
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Most importanr part of beekeeping is yet to come. That would be beekeeping the bees away from icehog.

J/K, stand looks cool, Vin. Looking forward to seeing the project move forward. :-)
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Very cool. You never know maybe the bees like to be watched, everyone has their kink.
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hahaha...

And yet, you have "Jesus sandles"....Oh, and April 11th on my calendar ...:-)
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Much like Jesus, my dad has the carpentry skills.
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