Bee Extraction - Fall 2009

These are the photos from the Bee Extraction in late summer 2009. The eave was opened up and the bees were vacuumed into the bucket. Then the hive was removed. We left the eave open for several days and sprayed it with vanilla water to remove the scent. Hopefully, it won't be a bee-home next year! We saved some of the honey--great taste--and from our own flowers, too. The bees were over-wintered at a lower altitude. This sparked enough interest that the youngest daughter Kate and I decided to enroll in the Boulder County Extension Service Bee-keeping Class. It lasted for 8 weeks, 3 hours once a week. There's a lot to learn.....

Why Bees????

Last summer (2009) a swarm of bees moved into the eave of our house, just outside our bedroom. We watched them with interest all summer. They seem to love the flower gardens and the mountain air. A friendly professional bee-keeper helped extract them from the eave in late summer. He had interest in finding a location for a mountain apiary site. We agreed that he would bring some of his hives to the mountain and I would start my own bee hives. I decided I wanted to become a bee-keeper!