May

May brought the spring weather, end of the school year and cousins from Ohio! We had such a fun time camping at Santa Cruz and then continuing the party at Mom and dad's house afterwards.

Santa Cruz 2021 was one of the best yet! So many cousin friends, good food and perfect weather.

I love watching the kids have fun and burn off energy all day long. They found a huge log, drug it out into the ocean and the tried to sit and float on it for the next 30 mins.

There's an endless supply of things for little boys to do. We tried really hard to work out way through this whole pile of wood but still had some left over by the end.

I barely have to haul anything down to the beach anymore! Santa Cruz gets more and more relaxing every year.

Taking a quick s'mores break between all the bike rides

So much fun! Thanks mom and dad for providing these great memories.

These hives each have one top feeder above it the deeps. The top feeders were only used because they were new hives and the bees need to consume a TON of honey/sugar syrup to build new wax comb. Once the comb is built it can be used for a few years until I feel like it's too old and I scrape it off. One important rule is that you can't put the feeders on when you have supers on because you don't want the bees turning this sugar syrup into pretend honey and storing that. Honey for human consumption or for the bees' winter storage should only come from nectar.

While we were getting all our own supplies the bees were busy building their own comb in the empty spaces in each hive. They LOVE building their own comb in every little empty spot. Everything needs to be "beespace" apart- this is the width of 2 bees passing each other. If there's a gap that's wider than this they will build their own comb. When they build their own comb like this they often build bigger cells and the queen lays male bees (drones) in those cells. Drones aren't too necessary for the hive so I just chopped all this comb off the bottom of these short frames once we got enough of the deeper frames and put the small frames into smaller hive boxes ("supers").

Another day, another homeschool outfit.

There were so many boxes of wood coming to the house so we could build dozens and dozens of different sized frames. The black pieces are made of plastic, coated in beeswax, and are called "foundation"- they get slipped into the wooden frames and the bees build their comb on this. The black makes it easier to see the bee eggs. Every inspection you look for bee eggs. The eggs tell you if you still have a queen bee and how well she's laying.