11th Annual Bee Camp 2024
https://bushfarms.com/beescamp.htm
I call this my "Tom Sawyer" bee camp. What I want is for you to come and do my bee work and pay me for it. But, of course I hope you get to learn a lot about how I keep bees in the process. Seriously it is how I hope to get somewhat caught up on bee work while teaching at the same time.
I call this a "camp" because it fits my view of what "camp" is. They have football camp, band camp etc. and in this case most of the participants are camping in tipis or their own campers or tents, so it is a camp in that sense as well as the "football camp" sense that we are focused on bees. I suppose we could call it a symposium, but that sounds so much more formal than sleeping in tipis, doing bee work and talking about bees all day and half the night. It is kind of an immersion into beekeeping as we will be doing things to do with beekeeping all day long for the most part. We may spend some time on other farm related things, but everyday will involve bees and most conversations will involve bees.
I saw this frenzy going on and turned the cover over to block the entrance. They were doing this same thing before I blocked it. They would pile up until they would fall in clumps. I slowed it down to try to see it better.
I consider propolizing a good trait for bees (maybe not for the beekeeper). Here is a mating nuc I found this year. The drilled hole is about 5/8". The reduced hole is about 5/16".
It wasn't working right and then it would and then it wouldn't. This is what I found. It couldn't get out, so I left it and used another smoker. It was finally out after two days.
We needed to feed because of a dearth and we still needed to finish building up the 8 frame nucs for winter. We bought 50 six gallon buckets and bought 3,450 pounds of sugar in 25 lb bags. We worked out the maximum strength we could do with hot water from my tap (140 F) and not have it crystallize out. We put one 25 pound bag in each bucket with a heaping tablespoon of ascorbic acid, then 18 pints of water and stir it with a five gallon paint stirrer. After 10 to 30 minutes we stir it again.
