Keeping bees is a lot tougher than I expected.

My first year as a beekeeper went great. My bees thrived all summer and fall, and got through winter just fine thanks to guidance from my wonderful bee mentor, Gerald Skaggs. He made everything easy for me.

My second year was going very well, too. I got lots of honey and left plenty in the hive for the bees. Unfortunately, we had a bad winter and the bees were tightly huddled around the brood to keep them warm so they couldn’t break the huddle to get to the honey one frame over and they starved.

Last spring I doubled-down and got a second hive and more bees. They were doing great until sometime between late-February, when I saw them flying on an unusually warm day, and mid-March, when both hives were dead. Apparently, one hive lost their queen and/or were robbed and another starved because I was ignorant and had their supplemental feeding tray in the doorway of the hive.

I admit, my confidence is not good right now, but I refuse to give up. My solution is to get more bees and call in the experts. For the next year, Mac Blount from the Savannah Area Beekeepers Association will be taking full charge of my new bees. My mentor, Gerald, has had some health issues and I don’t want to drag him out here every week.

Mac came out and inspected the dead hives before my bees arrived to figure out what went wrong. Once my new bees were here, he came to make sure they were settling in as they should, and he’s been back every week to keep tabs on them, often with his bee-pal Mike Armstrong. I watch everything Mac and Mike do, take notes, and do whatever they tell me in between visits, from feeding to resolving equipment issues.

Last week, they realized that one hive had lost its queen, which is a death sentence for the whole hive. Mac and Mike very cleverly took a frame that had larvae in it and moved it to the the queenless hive, prompting the bees there to turn one of the larva into a new queen, and today we saw that it’s working! (I hope I got all of that correct.)

My hope is that by next spring I will be capable of tending bees on my own without letting them die.

Please don’t die, bees.