Ponder Fancy Farm

07/30/2026

Don’t BEE afraid to make your apiary a little Fancy!!

07/30/2026

Remember, not all pollinating Bees are honey bees. This cute little Mason Bee is a liner but has a HUGE impact on pollination!

07/30/2026

Yellow jackets eating honeybees!!!

07/22/2026

Found some sisters sleeping on a sunflower together last evening.

Then some cousins having a sleepover on some Ironweed!

07/22/2026

Check out the coloring on some of these drones of one of my hives!!! Very unique!

Of course had to add a pic of the 2nd year queen as well.

07/19/2026

Do you have any Giant Ironweed blooming around your property? This is a great source of Nectar & pollen for honeybees and native bees! It’s also a great thing to have around if you want some Monarch Butterflies stopping by on their migration!!!

07/19/2026

Cute little bunnies being well bunnies.

07/14/2026

Talking point… So I clipped a few of my queens just to see how it’d go. Few days later I put screened bottom boards on 12 of my hives. A week or so goes by. I notice on a few hives they are bearding on bottom of screen. Looking all swarmy… so I say “know what I’m gonna drop that beard into a box and move it so I can try my hand at grafting some queens. As I been wanting to try it and set up a queen making hive. When I do, I find that in that beard is one of my clipped queens.

Now the way I figure is that since clipped she couldn’t go far, then she crawled back, crawled up one leg, then over to the hive I found her at. Then they bearded up in her.

I then found that a lot of the bees in one of the other beards had chewed wings (NOT DEFORMED WINGS) on them, like they had been trying to Robb and were well defended against.

Question 1.) do you think these beards hanging from screens bottom boards are robber “swarms”

Question 2.) how do you feel about clipped queens?

Question 7.) Do you understand BEE math???

… the pics are well after I dropped the big beard off, just showing that the bees in hive were very protective of that screen too …

07/03/2026

This swarm had started to settle in!!! Very neat to see. Check out the one Chuck Dailey has. It has massive comb!!!

06/28/2026