Aiden & Chloe's Farm

Aiden & Chloe's Farm Starting our Farm page. Beef cattle, calves, fruit and vegetables marketing and sales
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12/09/2026

Well, bad news. Looks like we are finally getting varroa. I did random alcohol tests 2 weeks ago that came back negative, but broke some drone brood while inspecting today and saw 1 mite in 1 hive and 2 in another. I will need to log it and then do another wash of every hive to determine.

Excuse the nasally voice (it's my first day outside after being down with a cold for a few days) but i took this video today to give you a walkthrough of our current hive setup.

After sticking inside for a few days with a nasty cold, today I need to get into some of the beehives.One of the goals f...
11/09/2026

After sticking inside for a few days with a nasty cold, today I need to get into some of the beehives.

One of the goals for this year is to improve the efficiency and organisation of my inspections. After uploading my inspection notes to the apilog app, I set 'next step tasks' and assign dates to them. When the due date comes along, I paste those tasks across into a word document (in the order for inspection) and put together an equipment list.

Before setting out for the inspections, I load all of the equipment into the trailer so that I've got it all on hand. So far, it has been paying off! I've taken a picture of this afternoon's folder to show what it looks like. I know a lot changes when you're in the hives and the plans can fall to pieces, but at least i've got enough equipment on hand that I can usually make it work or buy time until the next inspection.

11/09/2026

The bee year is well under way but we haven't done any extractions yet. We think we're about a month or two away from having jars. We've learnt not to be too specific in the honey planning when it comes to bees. Once we have done our first extraction we should have consistent supply, this year. We are starting the year with 13 hives and have already done 5 early splits that are tracking well. We are hoping to do 10 more in late September/early October.

This bee year we are changing it up. We will do 500g glass jars (instead of 400g), 1kg mini plastic buckets and 1.5kg mini plastic buckets. When at markets, we'll also have some bee-related books.

We haven't expanded the chickens this year (due to increased predators and bird flu concerns) but we are expecting to have a few occasional rainbow egg cartons, too.

29/08/2026

Aiden is off to Wagga Wagga for a week for a uni intensive. Everything at home will absolutely go to plan and no chaos will erupt for Chloe and Sue.

29/08/2026

Great outcome with the early walkaway splits! All five were still alive at day seven (today). Two of them had fresh eggs. This tells me that they got the original queen. I went into their parent hives and found queen cells which confirmed it. In the remaining three splits and the two parent hives, i cleaned them up so that they now only have 2 queen cells. One of the queenless parents had made a lot of queen cells over two frames, so i cheated and used one to make a sixth but smaller split.

From here, the 6 queenless hives are left untouched until day 30. At that point they get checked for signs of a laying queen. The hives that have queens will go back to standard inspections, which will be every 1-2 weeks for spring.

We are off to a ripper start. I wasnt expecting to start doing any splits until late-september. If any of these splits survive day 30 and grow reasonably quickly, they'll be transferred into their own hives and taken up to the new site while we continue to make splits at the home site.

Our goal is to grow by 15 hives, this bee year.

28/08/2026

Tomorrow's bee jobs will be interesting. Last weekend i did 5 walkaway splits to take some space pressure off some hives. I didn't quite have the supers ready in time to build them upwards. I'm not really expecting a high success rate as it's too early in the spring for this.

The splits can fail at 3 main times. The first is if there weren't enough bees shaken in or if too many flew back to the parent hive. This happens in the first day or two.

The second failure point is if they don't make viable queen cells. This is what I'll work out tomorrow. I need to work out whether the parent or split has the queen. Whichever half is queenless should have made queen cells. I need to squash all except for two, or put excess cells into another new split. This is to stop them continuously swarming until there's nothing left of the hive.

If they're still alive at this point, the next key date is day 30. At that point the queen either succeeded in returning from a mating flight... or it didnt.

Tomorrow we will see how many of the five made it through the second stage and have a chance at the third!

Today was a pretty big day. We picked up this mean machine in maffra, Aiden got into the hives and hive painting and chl...
22/08/2026

Today was a pretty big day. We picked up this mean machine in maffra, Aiden got into the hives and hive painting and chloe and sue moved and fed all of the animals.

It'll be a month before we test it, but the flail mower is hopefully going to help us in fighting the tussocks and speed up the soil-building.

The plan is to run it over the entire place in early spring and then over the rotational cell as the animals are moved out of them.

17/08/2026

I am absolutely stumped. I just did the first post-winter inspection to see who survived... and not only was every hive alive... but they're all full to the point where they're borderline honey bound!

Next weekend I'm going to have to put another box on every hive and/or begin some early splits!!! I can't believe it!

Yesterday we went up to the second site to lay the pallets down and put up a couple of signs. While we were there we put...
16/08/2026

Yesterday we went up to the second site to lay the pallets down and put up a couple of signs. While we were there we put down a swarm trap to a) maybe catch a swarm and b) see if anyone in the area will mess with the equipment. It's now all set up and our next visit will hopefully be to take up nucleus splits in September.

We have had a run of 15-18 degree days this week. I have a day off work tomorrow and it's looking like it will be a nice day. I might just be able to do the first post-winter inspection to see who survived the winter and how well they did.

15/08/2026

Assembling and costing bee frames

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Heyfield, VIC
3858

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