One part of our homesteadin’ ways is the hubs has a beekeeping hobby that he loves!  He has had beehives for the past 4 years.  We all love the bees and appreciate all that they do for our world…and when a hive dies – ahhhhh it is like 10,000 little pets have died.  It’s painful.

city hive

This year he has 5 hives all throughout our valley and even one at my parents’ house in the city.  He checks on them once in a while, but otherwise tries to let them do their thing.  Recently he has been gathering the excess honey from all of the hives.  They were busy little bees and the honey is going to be awesome this year (I’ll post about the harvest later), but we went up to one of our hives that is at our friends’ house in the mountains.  It has been our very best hive for the past 2 years.  But when Travis opened the hive this time — they were gone…GONE!  Every single bee and every single drip of honey was gone!  Bees are funny about their environment and if something is bugging them they will just pick up and move.  Well our friends are putting in an air strip on their property and crushing rock pretty close to the hive and we think because of this the bees picked up and left.  They could be anywhere…we will probably never find them, but I hope those bees and their 3 boxes of honey do well.

mountain hive

crazy DARK brown comb

queen cells

same hive, light colored comb