We are pleased to introduce Queen Cecelia Cordova First Queen of RockWing and her family….We got bees!!!!! When Caitlin was living up in Washington, she wanted and researched and took classes on bees, beekeeping and the effect bees have on the environment. After soooo many years of waiting we finally did it!
First we had to find a spot out in the Back 40 that would be far enough away from the everyday activity to be unobtrusive. We found a spot past a small wash (Andrew is working on building a bridge to get over it because that’s what he does), with a couple of lovely mesquite trees for shade. Then we needed to build an enclosure and some water, because the desert is trying to kill all things (javelina, coyotes, bob cats, etc.). With free pallets and some T posts we built a shade wall that will keep the big stuff out, then we used come cattle fencing and some more t posts and a small gate and we were done with the enclosure. We used 5 gallon water jug gravity waterer with some floaty bits for a near by water source. We will also have a solar powered pump fountain set up connected to a 55 gallon drum a bit further away for an easy to get to reliable source of water. Now all we needed was the bees! We decided on Pima bees from Wagon Wheel Ranch, Greg from there was super helpful and gave us some great insights on how to get our bees settled in.
Holy shit y’all, opening up the mesh on the front of the hive was TERRIFYING! There were so many angry bees flying around. But hopefully by tomorrow they will have settled and calmed a bit. Wish us and Cecelia luck! We also plan to seed some native wildflower seeds around to help Cece and her ladies out.