This will be an interesting year for my family and I. We will be first time beekeepers. We won a new beehaive starter kit. At the beekeepers Association last Monday. It has everything we need for the first year. And I already had a old bee box that someone gave me. So we will be starting out with two beehaives. I've got a nuc ordered for my old box and bees came with the one we won

Congratulations! Were you assigned a mentor?

We have 3 mentees this year, made site visits to 2 last weekend and their Nucs are coming in on Sunday. Another one will be next weekend, not this coming one. They ordered packages and delivery on those has been delayed until the beginning of April.

No they never assigned us a mentor they told us to get one though. There's 3 people that won. They made us write an essay on why we wanted to keep bees so my wife wrote the essay and my youngest daughter drew a picture. And we had to attend a short course. There were 10 people who wrote an essay. The other seven people that didn't win got $150 credit back towards their first bees. The three of us that did win we get to go to a workshop to put together are hives and paint them. The bees that I ordered for my old box I won't get them until the first week of May. The bees that came with the Beehive that we won I don't know when we get those.

It's always good to start off with 2 hives, if one is stronger, you can take a frame of brood to give the weaker one a little boost.

I'm hoping to be able to do a couple of splits this year, so far all 3 of my hives are doing well. This weekend I am going into them to see how the queen is doing with her egg laying, and if possible to take some frames of brood and honey and put them in a Nuc or 2. My goal is to end up this year with at least 9 hives.

Our garage looks like an assembly line, we have 13 new medium supers and assorted bottoms and tops we assembled and are painting. We were lucky and got 5 gallons of a beautiful robins egg blue outdoor paint so the honey supers will be blue this year

Good luck with your hives!

Tennessee law requires you tell the agricultural Extension agent you have bees. Bee prepared for inspections by someone who could have just opened a diseased hive an hour before. I also question their bio security procedures.

I would really hate it if our bees got sick from someone who should know better infecting them with disease from another hive

Luckily for us, Virginia only requires a permit and certificate of health inspection if you are selling bees (Nucs, comb, packages, etc). You do have to notify the State if you discover a disease in your hives, though.

The current regulations do give them the right to put registration requirements in place if they deem it's necessary. We only have one Apiarist for a multi county area and she's kept pretty busy inspecting sellers bee yards and the hives of the people who apply for the Bee Hive Grant program so unless there's an epidemic of some kind I don't think they will put registration practices into law.

I would not be a happy person if my bees got infected by some careless beekeeper after all the money I've just been I'm trying to setup two been over.

Today I put together 3 medium supers and 5 bottom boards I haven't got to put the screens in them yet.

I'm almost ready for my bees. I get my first nuc on Friday

Are you going to use those posts or are they just temporary?
They don't look like they will hold 100 lbs of hive with honey and brood

You could probably balance a semi truck on them they're not going to move they made of welded steel and concerted about 2 foot in the ground. The only problem is they were made for beehives with solid bottom boards. My bee hives have screen bottom boards so I have to put mine the other direction on them. I'll take more pictures when I have it set up.

Interesting, and are they adjustable for tilt? That's a pretty strong angle on the bottom, or is the picture skewed?

That's funny. I live on a pretty steep hill I should have realized that it looked like they were leaning but I can assure you they are 100% level. I showed the pictures to a guy I work with and he asked why they were leaning so bad. I'll try and take a better picture next time.

I just found out today that I'm not getting my days until the 29th of April I thought I was getting them tomorrow. Apparently they're not ready yet.

Here's a better picture of my bee stand

I'm getting ready to install my first nuc

Great I hope it goes smoothly
We are busy with swarms right now rom our hives. One seems to have decided to move into one of the empty hives on its own. We will know for sure tomorrow if they did move in or not

@mindy03 that's awesome how convenient just put an empty out there and let him move in on their own.
We just finished installing our nuc. That was one of the coolest things I've ever done my wife and I took turns she did a frame and I did a frame.

Looks great

The swarm has moved in so looks like we have another hive. It's a huge one too.
We didn't exactly set the empty hive out. My husband left empty hives in the orchard after the beds died in them a couple of years ago. He was just too busy to move them to the garage where he kept empty hives. So last year 2 hives moved in and this year so far one has moved in one. I've lost count of how many are out there but I think there's 5 move empty hives out there.

Mindy, the empty hives didn't get taken over by wax moths? All we have to do here is leave one empty box unwrapped for 24 hours and the wax moths are right on it!

No they didn't come in at all on the empty hives.
We have only had them appear once so far. They came in and attacked the bees in a hive and took it over. The whole hive was burned when they were discovered.
The swarm is settled in and have been busy cleaning their new home which is 3 hive boxes high and it is full to the top with bees.