Tee's Bees

Tee's Bees Founded with a passion for pollinators & love for nature, we offer educational opportunities, raw honey & products made from happy, healthy hives.

From our hives to your health!

09/02/2026

Apparently, September has entered the bee yard… and everyone has chosen violence.

I’ve been in the apiaries trying to get things done before the weather turned here in Southern Ontario.

The bees have been spicy.
The wasps have been relentless.

And there’s a reason everyone seems extra angry right now.

Late summer means nectar flows are slowing, and the bees are fiercely defending the honey stores they’ll need for winter. Robbing pressure from honeybees and wasps puts the guards on high alert.

Then add an approaching storm.

As the weather changes, more bees stay inside. So instead of opening a hive while thousands of foragers are away, you’re opening it while the whole family is home.

And they have opinions.

Then there are the wasps.

Unlike honeybees, wasps can sting repeatedly.

Today’s verdict:

WASP: 1
THERESA: 0

That one HURT.

So yes…

The bees are spicy.
The wasps are hungry.
Winter stores are worth defending.
And apparently, I chose this week to work in multiple bee yards and extract honey.

Because… beekeeper.

Sometimes reading your bees means reading the season — and the sky.

September is here. 🍂🐝

🐝💜 Tee’s Bees
The Alchemy Starts with the Hive

09/01/2026

Rainy days = creation days in the Tee’s Bees Alchemy kitchen. 🌧️🐝🍯

Today’s lineup…

🔥 A fresh batch of Hot Honey in the works
🌿 A brand-new trial infusion that I’m keeping under wraps for now
👀 And a few other Alchemy favourites quietly doing their thing in the background…

The new infusion is made with botanicals grown right in my own gardens — and that’s your only clue.

Okay… maybe one more. 😉

💜 + 💚

Any guesses what’s going into the honey?

This is the part I love — experimenting in small batches, playing with botanicals, tasting, tweaking and seeing whether an idea deserves a permanent place in the Tee’s Bees Alchemy collection.

Some experiments become products.

Some send me straight back to the drawing board.

We’ll see where this one takes us. 🐝🌿🍯

The Alchemy Starts with the Hive.

08/26/2026

Apparently, even shipping containers aren’t foolproof.

Earlier this week, something made its way onto my Muskoka apiary’s shipping containers — where the hives are elevated specifically to help protect them from wildlife.

The damage wasn’t significant, but was really interesting.

One hive had its honey super pushed completely off, leaving the brood boxes exposed during some very heavy rain. Two other hives appear to have been targeted, but they were simply too heavy to move — so whatever was up there started working underneath them instead, pulling and shifting pieces around the screened bottoms.

And one of my newer polystyrene hive boxes actually had chunks torn out of it (making me potentially reconsider these boxes)

Could it have been raccoons? Absolutely. Without a trail camera, I can’t say with 100% certainty.

But the evidence is making me strongly suspect a fisher.

Fishers are members of the weasel family and are incredibly agile climbers. They’re powerful for their size, equipped with strong claws, and are opportunistic predators and scavengers. A shipping container isn’t much of an obstacle if there’s a tree providing access.

And that’s where we made our mistake.

We normally keep the vegetation around the containers cut back. This spring, we didn’t get to the young trees that had sprouted beside them. Several had grown enough to create exactly the kind of climbing route a fisher could use to reach the top.

Once up there, the smell of honey, wax, brood and thousands of bees would certainly be worth investigating.

The pattern is also one reason I’m less suspicious of a bear. A bear capable of reaching these hives would likely have caused far more catastrophic damage than what I found.

So, lesson learned.

When you keep bees in Muskoka, you’re sharing the landscape with an entire ecosystem — and sometimes protecting your apiary means thinking like the wildlife around it.

We weren’t as inaccessible as we thought we were.

The trees have been cut back.

And I think it might be time for a trail camera.

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Muskoka, ON

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