Zen and the Art of Beeing

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Zen and the Art of Beeing was created as a way to document and share our backyard beekeeping experiences and spread appreciation and love of these incredible little creatures and the people who care for them.

13/12/2025

Mid-December hive inspections were not on my 2025 bingo card… but the rules are sometimes different with the research hives. It was fun to get a winter bee fix in yesterday when checking to see which colonies still have brood, and I thought this was a great visual representation of the “winter cluster” to share with you.

The third and fourth photos are shots of the bottom and top boxes, respectively, of a single colony; see how the bees are gathered together towards the middle frames? This is the cluster, and the population will contract into an even tighter, smaller area as temperatures drop. If you think of the cluster as a basketball (in this case, spread between the two boxes and roughly in the middle frames), the outer layer of bees provides an insulating shell, while bees on the interior vibrate their wing muscles to generate heat. The bees rotate through so nobody has to be on the outside for too long, and if they’re raising brood, they will keep the core temperature around 93F no matter what the temperature outside is - cozy!

In a two-deep setup, the bees will typically start winter in the bottom box, moving their way up as they eat through their winter honey stores; the cluster pictured here is still spread between both boxes. By spring, we’d expect most, if not all, of these bees to be in the top box.

Winter clusters are so cool - one of the incredible things bees do that allow colonies to survive the winter without hibernating.

06/12/2025

2025 Award-winning local Colorado honey would make *such* a nice gift for those special people on your list … limited jars still available (link in bio to buy on my website)!

I was so excited to share with my bees that their hard work won a bunch of ribbons at the Colorado state beekeeping meeting earlier this fall.

In Colorado’s 2025 honey show, they won:

🥈 2nd place in the state’s black jar contest! I was the most excited about this one because it’s the category with the most competition AND it’s the one category that is judged solely on the honey’s taste (so it’s not a test of how well you can prepare an entry to the category specifications). To enter, you transfer your honey into a black jar that looks exactly the same as everyone else’s, and the taste is evaluated by a panel of judges. It also amuses me that the second best tasting honey in the state of Colorado (as subjectively judged by this year’s honey show panel) came from the suburbs of Aurora 😂.

🥉3rd place in the extracted honey category for light colored honey. I lost some points for some air bubbles, not filling to exactly the correct level, and having some sticky residue on the jar. I almost didn’t enter this one because I just could not get the micro air bubbles to rise out and knew I’d lose points, so I was quite surprised with 3rd place! (Goes to show: you may as well try!)

🥈2nd place for both chunk comb (a chunk of honey comb in a jar of liquid honey) and cut comb (straight up honey comb in a box). Nobody beat me in these categories (and both had limited competition/entries anyway), but they also judge you to a standard, so if you don’t have a perfect enough entry meeting all of the requirements, you don’t qualify for a blue ribbon, even if you have the best entry at the show. I didn’t qualify for the blue on these due to a few cells that weren’t drawn evenly/completely and some wax bits in the chunk comb jar.

As you can see, the bees were thrilled to receive ribbons and recognition for all of their hard work this year! The other photos are some shots from the 2025 Colorado honey show.

02/03/2025

One of my favorite beekeeping tools is probably not on your typical list of bee gear … a garden cart! This cart is almost exactly the height of most of my hive stands and makes it not only possible, but also painless, to move hives around my yard 100% on my own. This is no small feat when a hive can weigh 70 pounds per deep box (some hives are two deeps), is generally cumbersome and unwieldy to move, and oh… is also full of thousands of stinging insects.

Moving hives isn’t something that I usually have to do much, but when I do want to do it, it’s nice to have the right tools. I used my cart several times this winter to move some hives to the garage during frigid arctic snaps, and while I’ll never know whether the colonies would have survived on their own if left outside, I’m glad to have had the option to easily move them! The cost of this cart was soooo worth the peace of mind it granted me during those cold nights knowing I’d done everything I could to help my smaller colonies.

22/10/2024

Something kind of amazing about beekeeping is the instant connection it creates with fellow beekeepers no matter where they live or your different backgrounds or methods of keeping bees. I had the great fortune of visiting beautiful Scotland earlier this month and one of the highlights of my trip was getting to meet Aga and nerd out with her about bees and beekeeping. I even got to buy some local Scottish highland honey … I could have stayed at her apiary chatting bees all day!

Aga - thank you so much for meeting with me, it was such a pleasure to meet and talk bees with you, and I am treasuring the delicious honey I brought home! 💕🐝

30/03/2024

Yesterday we talked about raw liquid honey - today let’s talk about the rawest of raw honey: comb honey! This is honey in its purest form, as it is found in the beehive.

A lot of people here in the US have never tried comb honey before, but it is such a treat, so give it a try if you get a chance! You can eat it as is, wax and all, although it can be a bit of an acquired taste since the wax is chewy and there’s a bit of a mental hurdle to get over to make yourself swallow it (it’s kind of like swallowing chewing gum! Of course, you can always spit the wax out like gum too).

A good way to try it without that hurdle is to eat it on or with something, like on a cracker, on a slice of toast, or with some cheese.

Comb honey is my favorite way to enjoy honey, either just alone or spread on some hot buttered sourdough toast. I also love the aesthetic of it - it’s just so beautiful (talk about leveling up your charcuterie boards).

Have you had comb honey before? Share your favorite ways to eat it in the comments! If you haven’t, I still have a limited number available in my shop (link in bio) for CO people (and for non-CO people - I’m sure you can find a local-to-you beekeeper who sells it!).... and I’d love to hear if you give comb honey a try and what you think of it!

07/02/2024

Look at this cute little queen poking her head out of her cell as she emerges!

She’s here to tell you: I finally posted part 2 of the queen rearing article I wrote for American Bee Journal last year to my blog! Part 2 includes this crazy flow chart I made to help you keep track of what days to do what when using different queen rearing techniques. It’s cut off here, but the full version is available in the post on my website. I’ll link it in my stories today for those interested!

29/01/2024

Sometimes I see a sunrise that makes me think maybe I should become a morning person.

05/01/2024

I made some beeswax luminaries for gifts this season… and totally love how they came out! I’m excited to press flowers from my garden this year to use in future ones. They’re such cozy little decorations for the cold months ahead!

(Pssst: And if you’re coming to the January mile hive bee club meeting next week, I’ll have a table there where you can make your own! 😉)

19/11/2023

Behold: My winterization setup!

The hive stack from bottom to top:
❄️Reduced entrances down to the minimum with a mouse guard on the open part
❄️Two deep brood boxes - the top being full of honey stores for the colony to move up into over the winter.
❄️On top of those frames are the sugar cakes I make for emergency food (or mostly peace of mind). I'll post a reel this week with the recipe but it's super simple - 1 TBS water per pound of sugar and an optional splash of vinegar.
❄️A shim surrounds the sugar cakes (The black tape is just because this shim was not sitting perfectly flat and there were gaps, so I taped it to seal those up).
❄️The inner cover
❄️Slab of insulating foam cut to the same size of the inner cover
❄️The outer cover

Then I add a ratchet strap to keep everything together (since the foam pushes up the outer cover more than it otherwise would be), and to keep those propolis seals between layers nice and tight.

This winterizing style is considered a "condensing hive" (vs. a "ventilating hive"). In a ventilating hive, a top entrance is provided which helps vent out moisture. In a condensing hive, though, top insulation is added and an upper entrance is not provided. It mimics a wild colony's nest in a rotted out tree. Any moisture is shunted to the walls of the hive, where the bees can access and use it (bees DO need some moisture/water in the winter; they need it to liquify sugary foods like crystallized honey or dry sugar and use it in brood rearing when that starts up again). The bees can control the ventilation as needed, with more heat being kept in the hive rather then vented out, allowing the bees to consume less honey over the winter to keep warm.

I'll put some great resources on condensing vs. ventilating setups in my stories today for those of you wanting to learn about it further.

I've had success with the condensing hive setup for all 4 of my Denver area winters so far (haven't ever tried the ventilating style), although I do suspect this is one of those things for which many methods work as long as the bees are healthy and populous enough!

What about you? Are you team condensing hive or team ventilating hive?

10/10/2023

My oh my… how the tables have turned!! 🤣

01/10/2023

Surprise!! It’s been about four weeks since I got into this colony because I try not to disturb them when mite treatments are on, and I was not expecting to see two giant capped queen cells! Let’s play detective and see what’s going on…

I couldn’t find the marked queen, although there were eggs. It’s possible these two queen cells are swarm cells and the queen just left with a swarm, but I think it’s unlikely. Swarm cells are usually on the edge of combs, there’s usually much more than just a couple, there is plenty of space in the colony (no overcrowding/lack of space to lay triggers for swarming), and it’s late for swarms.

So, assuming they’re playing by the “normal” swarming rules, these could be either emergency or supercedure cells; both of these types of queen cells are typically built off the face of the comb, as seen here. But if the queen was here in the last 3 days (as evidenced by the presence of eggs), then these probably aren’t emergency cells, since those are started after a queen suddenly disappears and would not yet be capped. That’s why I think these are supercedure cells.

Most of the time, I like to let the bees take care of queen replacement; they know better than I do when it’s needed. And that’s exactly what supercedure cells are - they sense that it’s time for a new queen (maybe the old one is getting too old, injured, has reduced pheromones, is running out of stored s***m, etc.). But it’s getting pretty late in the year for them to try to raise a queen! I am still seeing drones, but with our first frost right around the corner, I don’t know if there’s time to get a queen mated.

I have an extra queen from a mating nuc who needs a home so she may get put in here… and then, because these are the largest queen cells I’ve ever seen and I hate to waste potential queens, I may move these cells to the mating nuc and see if one queen can manage to get successfully mated this time of year. If she does… well, I’ll have to figure out what to do then!

29/07/2023

Last week, decided to re-queen with the varroa-resistant POL-Line queen I have coming this week. She arrives on Wednesday! So we need to decide before then which method we will use to requeen.

There are three main methods of requeening a colony:
1) Direct
2) Indirect
3) Nuc

In all methods, the colony must have been queenless for at least around a day.

In direct requeening, the new queen is released directly into the colony. This is the riskiest method of the three - the bees haven't had time yet to get used to her, so directly introducing her does increase the chance that they will kill her. Some beekeepers might do it for situations in which a colony is calm, queenless, and appears to be friendly towards the caged queen, but it won't be successful in all situations.

In indirect requeening, the new queen is placed into the colony in the cage she comes in (a version is pictured), and the colony gradually gets used to her. The cage usually has a candy plug followed by a cork. Some beekeepers remove the cork immediately and the candy will be eaten within a couple days, or you can extend this introduction time by coming back to remove the cork after a few days and let them start removing the candy plug at that time. This last method is the safest since they have a few more days to get used to her and you can confirm they appear to have accepted her/are no longer aggressive before removing the cork, but you do have to go back one extra time.

A final method doesn't make sense for our situation since we have just a mated queen coming, but it is worth mentioning: if you happen to have a nuc on hand with a queen you want to use for the requeening, you can simply remove a few frames from the colony that will be requeened, and install the nuc (with queen) into one side of the colony in the space made by removing the other frames.

Which would you like to see done for our colony next week: Direct, Indirect with immediate cork release, or Indirect with cork release 3 days later? Be sure to go vote in my stories (and also vote on what to do with the old queen when she is removed on Tuesday), and follow along this week to see how it goes!

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