After a fun-filled camping trip in Southern Missouri, we stopped at the regional beekeepers' meeting last Monday night to pick up a 3lb package of bees to start a new hive on our homestead.  Although we had kept bees for several years on our Oregon homestead, we ended up selling the hives and most of our equipment before we moved, so essentially, we are starting from scratch. In some ways, this has been a blessing, as it's given us the opportunity to really think about what kind of hive we wanted, and how many hives we felt capable of tending at this time. While I am excited about looking into top bar hives as a future opportunity, at this point we went with what we were already familiar … [Read more...]