Honey Harvest

Finally! After a year of bee keeping, we have a sweet result.  We spent five hours last weekend extracting the honey (a topic for another post), bottled it today, and now have five gallons of honey!

Swarm!

My daughter was swinging on the playground set this morning and heard a buzzing sound.  She turned around and saw a cloud of bees coming from our apiary towards her. She describes it as something from a sci-fi movie. (Bees are practically harmless when they swarm, so my daughter knew she was in no danger.)

We couldn't get the camera fast enough to capture an image of the swarm because the bees settled in the tree above our playground and formed this lovely clump around their queen. They'll rest here while scouts go look for a suitable place to set up a new home.

My husband is now rushing to the state line where a farmer we know makes hive parts. I called the farmer, and his wife told me she's had two hives swarm today and has had customers coming in and calling all morning.  Apparently this is the day to swarm!

New Life

Spring means new life. And we have plenty of it around here!

Our butterfly house is full of Painted Ladies.  We plan to release them on Easter when the family is here to celebrate with us.  We've had unusually warm weather around here, so the butterflies should do well outside.

In the shot above, you can see the inside of the butterfly house, with two Painted Ladies clinging to the wall.  The red dye on the wall and floor of the house is leftover after their transformation from rather homely caterpillars to colorful butterflies.  We never before wondered where all that color comes from.  They make it themselves; how cool is that?

Another addition to our menagerie is a second Queen Bee.  Hers is the smaller hive.  The taller hive has two honey-supers on top.  We've been so unseasonably warm this year that we expect to harvest honey well before summer.

And finally, nothing says spring like NEW CHICKS!!!  Three Golden Buffs (aka Red Stars) joined us this week.  Their names are Katniss, Ginny, and Churchill.  You may or may not be able to tell what my children are each reading based on these names.

Happy Spring!

Bee, I'm Expecting You...

When the dining room table is covered in sweet smelling frames, you know it is that time of year...time to prepare for a new hive.

We had so much fun with our first hive that we are expanding the bee yard this year.

I had a beautiful, breezy day in early March, so I painted the hive boxes outside.  The honey bees could smell the familiar scent of the frames on the wood and were very curious.  Luckily no bee was hurt by the paint, but the cat (also very curious) ended up with a white paw.

Bee Check

We had some friends join us this weekend for a bee inspection!  It was a lot of fun.

 We removed the entrance reducer (that stick shown below on the brick).  The bees were so cute, though, and continued to enter and exit the hive from the exact spot where the hole was located in their entrance reducer.  We removed the reducer so that more air can get in and out of the hive, allowing for greater ventilation as the weather warms.

The bees are looking good!

Collecting Pollen

The bees are having a great time collecting pollen.  Judging from the queue in the picture below, we will need to widen the entrance soon.

The pollen is in little sacs on their legs called pollen baskets. Some collected orange pollen and some have collected a yellow pollen today.  Different flowers, different pollen.

In the above picture, a bee who has already deposited her collection is now departing to go get some more. Her legs are pollen-free.

Bee Check

The bees are starting to outgrow their two-deep hive, so today we added a third box for them. 

 Above, you can see the box full of empty frames.  We added it to the top of our existing hive.

While we were in the bee yard, we took a look at how the girls are doing.  It is so nice to see that they are successfully raising a new generation.  Look closely in the picture below to see the C-shaped larvae in the comb cells. The workers feed the larvae and eventually cap the cells when the larvae stop eating.  What emerge just a few days later are honeybees, ready to work.

Bee Check

We made a bee check this weekend and were mostly pleased with what we saw. Above, you can see the bees using the top feeder to eat sugar water.  They crawl up through an access hole, over a wooden wall, and down to the water.  Somehow one or two bees still manage to get into the large pool and drown, but for the most part, the feeder works pretty well. We noticed some mold on the inside wall of the feeder, so we will ask about that at our next bee meeting.

 In this picture you can see that the bees are mainly in the center frames of the hive.  On top of their frames is a grease patty they eat to help them manage mites.

 We noticed on this visit that our ten frames still allow some space in between each one.  The bees can't stand the space and fill it up with extra comb. Above, you can see a large example that fell off when we removed a frame to examine.

Brave Husband (who didn't even wear gloves on this visit) holds up a frame to check.  In the sun, wearing a veil, it is hard to see what is really going on inside this frame; but thanks to modern technology, we were able to enlarge this photo on the computer and look inside some of the cells.  We were very pleased to see eggs and larvae which means that our queen is laying!

Installing Honeybees

As soon as my cat became quite used to her new play area, we've ruined all her fun by installing honeybees.

The honeybees arrived in a package of about ten thousand.  The queen was inside a smaller cage in the center of the cage you see below.

 We sprayed the package several times with sugar water to make the honeybees happy and full.  It also attracted a variety of neighborhood bees and other winged insects into our garage.  Note to self: don't spray tons of sugar water in the garage next time.

Brave husband and brave son (in baggy beekeeper suit!) opened the package and literally dumped the bees into the hive.  (Little brother needed to hang back because we don't yet own a veil for him.)   They made an opening in the tiny queen cage and wedged the queen cage into the hive where the other bees will hopefully find her and rescue her from her little cage by chewing through the candy that blocks her exit.  Finally, a top-feeder full of more sugar water was placed on top of the hive and the lid was sealed with a brick to stop the high winds from wrecking everything.

Now we just need to wait and see if the honeybees like their new home.

Busy as Bees

We've been busy this spring! New this year is an asparagus patch.

It won't yield any asparagus this year or next, so it is more of a long-term investment.

Speaking of long-term investments, we are also starting an adventure with honeybees. We won't get any honey until at least next year.

After spending a weekend digging the asparagus pits, I spent several days transforming a huge patch of grass (above)

into a bee yard. (below)