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Here are some selected pictures and videos of the apiary installation. We are so pleased that our five hives are doing so well!!

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We set up stern warning signs all around the apiary to make sure nobody wanders into the bee yard – and also to deter anyone who might be interested on coming onto the property.

Installing the hives – Ruby staged the small “nucleus” hives next to the big hives they would be moving into. It was like tetris but with thousands of bees.

This is a five-frame “nucleus” hive – Ruby picked up five of these small hives from a local apiary that specializes in “survivor bees” that are locally adapted to Southern Oregon.

Each nucleus hive was moved, frame by frame, into a bigger box with space for eight frames. The far left is a feeder (there is a special “bee tea” inside that will help them to build up their colony), then the five original nucleus frames, then two frames that were already partially filled with resources (honey, nectar, pollen) by last year’s bees.

The big bee with the pink dot is QUEEN CLEOPATRA. See how different she looks than the worker bees who are attending to her?

This is all POLLEN that the bees collected and stored in the hive.

We are planting native wildflowers and trees to supplement the pollen and nectar sources available for bees and local native pollinators. We planted two small patches of native columbine along the path to the apiary (and there’s already a bunch growing on the land).

This is the apiary, all set up! From left to right, the hives are named: Cleopatra, Sickle, Lil Kim the Queen Bee, Beyonce, and Queen Lateefah.