An incredibly busy summer

I'm finally catching up on my blogging and website.  It has been a very busy summer for me personally.  COVID definitely added a layer of complexity to life.  On top of this, two of my children had weddings recently. If anyone has had children get married you know what kind of effort that is - this was times two.  One of the weddings was at our home, so my To Do list was very long.  One project I finally finished was building concrete benches, which is what can be seen in the photo above.  I created a stencil of the Back Forty Bees logo and added it to the bench top (I stained the whole thing later).  

A fun aspect of my kid's new spouses was the addition of a beekeeper.  Above, my new son-in-law is inspecting his hive with me (looking for the queen actually). It is nice to have a fellow beekeeper in the family. 

For beekeeping, it was a good year for honey, but very wet in my area (72 inches and counting, according to my rain gauge). I had more problems with small hive beetles than typical and I think this was due to the weather.    Nuc production did well this year, in the photo above I had to double stack some of the nucs for folks who delayed picking up their bees.  I'll catch up more as we move into Autumn and life steadies out a bit.