September 2021 Update S5E73 #beekeeping #homesteading

Agent 99, Barbara Feldon... Ah dated myself. Nice update, sure hope I don't get your crawler disease here in Northwest Arkansas.

Less than 1/4" of rain in about 4 weeks in NE OK. Maybe we'll get some this week. Your opening shot looks like my pond bank. The girls like that muddy water. Robbing is a pain and feeding has been difficult. Hope you get some rain this week as well!
My 4th OAV treatment really killed a lot of mites. Hardly saw any the first 3. This last one was really effective. I'll do one more this week for insurance.

Spray sugar water on every entrance and you can fill your feeders

Beautiful house! I love the rest of your place too.

Open all the tops on your hives and that will end the robbing. When your inspecting.

If you feed late ( dusk) there should be no robbing ,as bees are mostly done for the day.

I see you have that wonderful red clay that won't hardly grow anything like I do! Thanks!!!

Darren, I have a theory on why the State Fair bees didn’t stay, maybe they were expecting you to feed them Cotton Candy and Candy Apples. lol. Hopefully you will get some rain before the Golden Rods dry up so you can do your inspections. The homestead is looking good and I’m glad that you didn’t have any catastrophes to report on! It seems like you’ve had you share this year. Please tell Mrs Jerome that here flowers are beautiful and I know it takes a lot of work to get them like they that. Thanks for the video!

We got back into chickens this year. They're just starting to lay pretty good.

It’s amazing the amount of work you two could accomplish…must work like two wound up bunnies all day long :)

In your area how much honey do you estimate a double landstrom hive need going thru your normal winter?

I saw a bee keeper that made 5 gallon bucket feeder. Maybe a few of them will help.

I need to work on some irrigation lines for my garden.

How do you keep the bees out of the hummingbird feeder? I had to take mine down lol

Great video ❤

Sounds like you'll be doing a lot of feeding of the bees so toss on those top feeders and load them up! Getting them fed up might reduce some of the robbing. Take one of those Jester nuc boxes out to hold any frames pulled off the hives during inspections it'll help some. With the robbing I was having I just stopped inspections... I know they are all queen right and treated for mites so just need to fatten them up. Temps are cooling here in Pennsylvania so won't be long now hopefully that I can put the bees to bed for the winter. Reducing sizes of entrances might also help with robbing issues when feeding.

You might want to consider getting some cover crop on those areas of land that you potentially want to grow things on. There are so many different types of cover crop that will suit, and more importantly serve to improve, more or less every single soil type and it really does look as if your soil could do with some improvement - no disrespect intended. Not only will cover crops introduce masses of good nutrition into your soil but also loads of organic matter, which will help in breaking up hard packed soil and help with drainage in those areas that get flooded when the rain comes. It is of course not an instant fix but a fairly simple, organic, and not too costly way of making more of your land in a natural way. Who knows, in a few years you could have a thriving oasis with hardly any effort 😄

Thanks for the tour; very impressive. Your hard work is evident in your results!

Thanks for the update, especially on netting over chickens. Good luck from Slovenia 👍