Lady Lea's Apiary

09/29/2026

🐝 UPCOMING BEE CLASS: OVERWINTERING 🐝

Winter is coming, and what you do with your hives NOW can make a big difference when spring arrives.

Join us for 1½ hours focused on getting your colonies ready for Western New York winter.

We’ll cover:

🍯 Food stores and feeding
🐝 Hive preparation
🦠 Mite, disease and pest management
❄️ Winter protection, insulation and ventilation
🌱 What to expect when spring arrives

📅 October 20th
⏰ 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM
📍 6608 Shawnee, Wheatfield, NY 14120
💰 $65 per person

Spots are limited! Call 716 305 3005 to reserve your spot.

Whether you’re a new beekeeper getting ready for your first winter or you’ve been keeping bees for years, come spend an evening talking bees with us.

🐝 Lady Lea’s Apiary LLC
Healthy Bees • Pure Honey • A Brighter Tomorrow

09/13/2026

Apparently I hired a new employee at Lady Lea’s Apiary. 🪿🐝
She has no beekeeping experience, doesn’t know how to check mites, and has absolutely no idea what a queen looks like…
But she eats grass, keeps the area around the hives cleaned up, and apparently believes she’s head of security. 😂
I’ll give her credit though, keeping the grass down around the hives is actually useful. Every beekeeper needs an assistant. I just didn’t expect mine to follow me around the apiary like she owns the place. 🤣
Welcome to the team, girl. Your first day on the job is going great. 🪿🐝

08/27/2026

Some colonies are just nasty. Not defensive because of weather, not because we opened them at the wrong time—just consistently aggressive bees that make every inspection harder and more dangerous than it needs to be.

Today, we’re requeening one of those colonies with one of our instrumentally inseminated VSH queens.

This isn’t about simply replacing a queen. The queen is the genetic foundation of the colony, and her genetics influence the temperament, productivity, brood pattern, hygienic behavior, and overall performance of the next generation of workers.

When a colony consistently demonstrates excessive defensiveness, allowing that genetics to continue reproducing can create problems for the beekeeper, neighbors, employees, customers, and anyone else who may have to work around the apiary.

Our goal is to replace those genetics with something better.

This II VSH queen comes from carefully selected stock with an emphasis on Varroa Sensitive Hygiene (VSH), strong colony performance, brood quality, and manageable temperament. Instrumental insemination allows us to control the genetics going into the queen rather than leaving mating entirely to chance.

And this is important: you don’t put a new queen in a nasty colony and expect the entire colony to become gentle overnight. The existing adult workers were produced by the previous queen and will remain in the hive until they naturally age out. As the new queen’s daughters emerge and become the workforce, we can begin evaluating the change in temperament.

That is why requeening is a management decision—not a quick fix.

We breed for bees that perform, bees that can defend themselves when necessary, and bees that we can actually work with.

Better genetics. Better management. Better bees.

08/22/2026

08/22/2026

Lady Lea’s Apiary🐝 Managing the Apiary program for The Arc Erie County New York with the help of Teresa K who has been feeding them!

08/15/2026

This one hurts.

When Lady Lea’s Apiary took on the responsibility of managing the bee program for The Arc Erie County, it was not something we simply showed up and put together overnight.

There were months of planning, equipment, hive preparation, bee health considerations, site planning, transportation, installation, and countless hours of work behind the scenes to make this program a reality. We are building something that we believe can educate, create opportunities, and bring people closer to agriculture and the incredible world of honey bees.

After the hives were installed, we heard rumors that some people who ride ATVs and dirt bikes through posted private property were talking about destroying the hives.

We hoped it was just a rumor.

Unfortunately, someone has now been throwing rocks at the hives.

The electric fence was installed to help keep wildlife away from the colonies. It was never intended to protect the bees from people.

These are not just boxes sitting in a field. They represent an enormous amount of work, planning, money, time, and living creatures that we are responsible for protecting. There are thousands upon thousands of honey bees inside those colonies, along with queens that have been carefully selected and managed.

We are proud to be The Arc Erie County’s Master Beekeeper and to help build this program. We believe in what this partnership can become, and we are not going to let a few irresponsible people take that away.

If you see someone intentionally interfering with, damaging, or throwing rocks at the hives, please report it to the appropriate authorities and let us know.

Respect the posted property. Respect the program. Most importantly, respect the bees.

We put too much heart, work, and planning into building this colony to watch someone destroy it for entertainment.

🐝 Lady Lea’s Apiary
Beeking Ed Master Beekeeper | Managing The Arc Erie County Bee Program