About us

Jillibees Apiary is only run by the two of us as a retirement hobby. Our goal is to educate and inspire our community including schools on the importance of honey bees and other pollinators for current and future generations.

We host hives, rescue bees, provide beekeeping maintenance, extract honey, render wax as well as all other duties pertaining to beekeeping. In addition, we add to the website and social media to keep everyone informed that follow us on our beekeeping journey.

We started our backyard beekeeping May 16^th 2018 when Jill brought the first Bee Nuc home.  Since that time, we have discovered that having two hives is better for a start than just one. We were new and were in the learning stages of beekeeping. If we had lost that hive, we would have had no hives and possibly even given up. We all make mistakes and the possibility of losing a hive always exists.  Another reason is to have the opportunity to compare the hives.  If one appears to be weak, you can strengthen it with the other. If one hive loses their queen, you can place a brood frame from the other and they will raise a new queen.

Our very first hive set up.

We were successful in keeping our original hive and in April, we will be adding three more hives.  We contemplated getting packaged bees. The thought of having them shipped and picked up from the Post Office did not seem fair to the bees and we were not sure where they came from. We did know however, that they did not come in from our area. We decided again to get three nucs.  The easiest way for a beginning beekeeper is to get a Bee Nuc. A Nuc, or bee nucleus is a partially developed colony with food stores, brood, etc built up consisting of four to five frames.  A package is the opposite of a Nuc consisting of two to four pounds of bees and a separated queen.  You are starting from scratch in building a colony.

We will eventually be raising our own queens and increasing the amount of hives in our apiary.  We also are excited about helping others do the same.