Red Bucket Farm

We put the Mason Bees outdoors this morning. They have been in storage in the refrigerator for the winter, where they remain dormant but ...

The weather at Red Bucket Farm has been fairly dreadful in terms of our honeybees. Towards the end of October, we covered the hives with ...

The red hive in the foreground and the green hive in the background are both exhibiting new hatches of bees. Notice most of the bees are ...

I'm sorry to report that the honeybees at Red Bucket Farm are all dead. It was not the polar vortex that secured their demise. I su...

The deadline to register for the Landscape Pesticide Registry in Wisconsin is February 1.  Go straight to the website for the Department ...

Early this afternoon, I noticed a group of bees outside the red hive taking orientation flights. These bees have recently hatched and so ...

On Saturday, March 2, we conducted a partial inspection of two (out of three) top bar bee hives. At noon the weather was 40 degrees and s...

On Monday, February 18, daytime temperatures at Red Bucket Farm approached 45 degrees with full sunshine. The honeybees in two of my topb...

A few days ago, Mother Nature delivered a significant blizzard---around 18 inches of snow and high winds. Since then, temperatures have r...

A few weeks ago we began winterizing our beehives. We started by wrapping the bee yard with heavy plastic. The arbor-like structure aroun...

This is just a quick update on our beehives. In July, we had such an extended heat wave that one of our top bar hives experienced a damag...

We experienced a disaster in the bee yard at Red Bucket Farm. Due to extreme heat in the first week of July (over 100 degrees for three c...

Perhaps I was too eager in my blog post this morning. At 12:45 pm, my brave little swarm of bees absconded the red hive. It took them th...

On Tuesday of last week (April 24), I saw a "practice swarm" over the blue hive in my bee yard. A practice swarm is when several...

When we pulled on our bee suits Sunday afternoon, we didn't have any intention of harvesting honey. We had noticed through the hive obse...

Look very closely at this photo. Can you see what it is? On the ground immediately below the entrances of the bee hives are hundreds of dea...

Yesterday the weather was warm and sunny. We reached a record high of 51 degrees and the bees took advantage of it. There was plenty of bee...

Last spring I nearly had a heart attack when my neighbor's chemical lawn service arrived just as the currant bushes in my side yard wer...

It's a beautiful fall day today--40 degrees and sunny with a light breeze--perfect for hanging clothes on the line. It's also a per...

Generally speaking, bees don't fly when the temperatures dip below 50 degrees Fahrenheit. They stay tightly clustered inside the hive, ...