Back to the bees

What a beautiful sunny day – perfect for beekeeping! Kristin and I did our first hive inspection of the year this afternoon. Both hives survived the winter. Both had plenty of honey left. And to our surprise, Beezus was FULL of bees. Beezus was the weaker hive last year. She lost her queen early on and had a low population throughout the summer. We never took honey from that hive. Today, her population was probably twice Ramonas. It's so good to see that hive doing so well. The bees have a head start this year with lots of comb already made. Once the nectar starts flowing, the honey should too. (Fingers crossed.)

Farm report

Winter on the "farm" is a little slower than summertime, but there's still lots of activity out there. The chickens are laying well. We're getting 4-5 eggs a day from our seven hens. I think I may not have announced to the internet the tragic end of the eighth chicken. Poor Charlie Shortino disappeared a while back during a day out in the yard. We assume she was taken by a predator of some sort but we had nothing but a pile of feathers as evidence. Right after the incident we confined the girls to coop. But lately they have been getting some supervised outings so they can explore the snow and peck at the bits of grass that are peeking through.


Walter is still an excellent chicken catcher, but mittens make the whole thing a bit more difficult. Don't worry. This awkward hug was quick and Love was not harmed.

Our more mysterious creatures, the bees, seem to be doing well. We don't check on them often, assuming they are taking care of themselves. Today was warm enough to take a peek and this is what we found:

Ramona is full of bees! According to what we've read, (Ok, what Kristin has read. I'm lazy.) the queen starts laying again in January to build up the hive. Looks like Queen Ramona has been doing a great job of that. That big dark spot is all bees.

In comparison, here's our weaker hive, Beezus:

We only saw one live bee, but the hive was still humming. There's definitely activity in there, but we may not know how much until we inspect the hive in spring.
The seed catalogs have arrived and garden plans are in the works. We are all looking forward to the snow melting and spring to come.

The bee movie

Even though I was too sticky to take photos of our first honey harvest, I certainly didn't want to leave the event undocumented. So I asked our friend, John Kuehl, of Kuehl on Location, to come and do some documenting for us. John has been taking our family photos ever since Walter was a year old. (One, two, and three.) These days he is venturing into video and, just like his photos, the outcome is fantastic. See for yourself.

It was a fun day with the whole family. My father-in-law helped us figure out how to put the extractor together. My mom held everything steady while I used the drill to spin out the honey. Nate helped wrangle the kids and brought us wet towels for when things got too sticky. And my brother-in-law treated us to home-cooked chili and cornbread. With honey, of course. I'm thinking honey harvest day could turn into an annual celebration. 

How sweet it is

Our first honey harvest was last weekend! I didn't tell you about it because I didn't have any photos to share (no one likes a post without photos). And I didn't have any photos to share because I was up to my elbows armpits in honey during the extraction process. My camera thanked me for not getting it involved. But today was bottling day – a process much less sticky than extraction. So here I am, with photos! Yay!

We took two supers of honey from Ramona. Each honey super has ten frames, so we had 20 frames of honey to extract. From those 20 frames, we bottled over 5 gallons of honey! Ramona is still working hard and we expect one more super of honey by the end of the season. Beezus is still struggling, so we won't be taking honey from her. We'll let those bees keep everything they can make.

We've decided to label our honey with the name "Quimby Apiary" in honor of our sister hives, Beezus and Ramona. I'm still working on designing the label. I'm my own worst critic.

The bees. They're bearding.

When it gets hot (and, oh golly, it's been hot!) bees will "beard" on their hive. They cluster up around the entrance to cool off and to allow more air circulation in the hive. Our bees are doing just that:

You'll notice that Ramona is a bit taller than Beezus. During our last inspection, Beezus' first honey super was near empty, while Ramona's was almost full. We don't really know why, but we've noticed that Beezus seems to have fewer bees than Ramona and it's definitely showing in the honey production. It's fascinating to me that two seemingly identical hives, in the same environment, are performing so differently. I'm curious to see how the rest of the season will play out.

For the bee nerds

If you have 11 minutes to spare, and you're at all interested in bees, watch this video. It's a short film from 1951 about the social life of bees. It's all still relevant – bees haven't changed in the past 60-some years. (Film quality has improved a bit!) At about 7:20 there's some info about how destructive ants can be to a hive. We found ants in the tops of our hives a couple of weeks ago, but managed to get rid of them by sprinkling cinnamon in and around the hives. Bees don't mind cinnamon and it won't affect the taste of the honey, but ants hate it. There's a little trivia for you. Don't say I never taught you anything! 

Thank you, to Brain Pickings, a blog I browse from time to time when I need a little inspiration. This video was posted there today.

Busy bees

The bees are busy! Still sucking down sugar syrup and building comb like crazy. We have been adding boxes to the hives as they fill up with bees and capped brood. The hives now have three brood boxes each. (The top box is a feeder box.)

These three boxes will be where the queen hangs out – laying eggs, making more bees. In a week or two, when the third brood box is full of bees, we will start adding honey supers to the top of the hives. We'll add a queen excluder between the brood boxes and honey supers to keep the queen from laying eggs in the honey. I don't know about you, but I like my honey to be larvae-free. 
Here's a frame of bees, with some capped brood and some open comb that new bees have already emerged from:

During our inspection today, we saw both queens. The queens are much larger than the other bees and their abdomens sort of shine, making them stand out in their crowd of bees. Here's Ramona's Queen:

And Beezus' queen, who was a little camera shy:

After our inspection today we built 6 more boxes and frames to fill them all. We are ready for the rest of the season. Bring on the honey!

Hive helpers

The bees needed more food. Both hives had gone through a quart of syrup already, so we gave them both a refill. Walter was a great helper! He was happy to put on a veil and gloves and he calmly looked around, asking questions the whole time. I love that he's so interested and able to keep his cool around all those bees.  


Molly is doing great with them too. So far she's more interested in the jar of syrup than the bees.

Beezus and Ramona

Today was the day! Bee day! 
A little background... My sister, Kristin, and I decided to get some bees – two hives, living on our property. Kristin is in it for the honey. We get the added benefit of bees pollinating our fruit trees and garden. We built our hives a few weeks ago, and today the bees arrived!
You guys, this was one of the coolest things I've ever done! Let me walk you through the afternoon. We picked up our bees in Watertown, from Dadant & Sons. It was an entire barn full of bees. Here's what a pallet of bees looks like:

And here's Jess, with his package of bees. We carpooled with Jess, and since he did this last year, we stuck around and watched him install his bees before attempting it ourselves. It was great to be able to watch a successful installation to build our confidence. 

Here's a "package of bees." Each 3lb package holds about 10,000 bees. We got two packages, one for each hive. The can in the middle is filled with sugar syrup to feed the bees and that tiny tab of metal on top is connected to the queen cage. 

This is the empty hive, with a few frames removed so we can install the bees.

First, we removed the queen cage from the package.

There she is! The queen cage has a cork on the end to hold the queen in. We took out the cork and put a marshmallow in the end. This holds her in until her bees eat the marshmallow and release her.

Next, the queen was placed between two frames.

Then, we poured (literally poured!) the bees into the hive.
Kristin poured:

I poured:

Bees everywhere:

We replaced the remaining frames.


And gave each hive a jar of sugar syrup to eat.

Done! Our bees are installed! Now we give them some time to settle in and release their queens. A whole afternoon of bees and only one sting. (Sorry, Kristin. I hope it's the first and the last!) 
Here they are, our sister-hives. That's Beezus on the left and Ramona on the right.

Building hives

The bee hives are built! Kristin and I spent the afternoon assembling, hammering, and painting with our two little helpers, Kyla and Walter. And Nate helped too, of course. 
We will have two hives. To get us started, we assembled 8 supers:

50 frames with foundation – the foundation helps the bees build straight comb:

And we painted the outsides of the supers dark purple and light purple. Why purple? Because we had purple paint. The bees don't care. But I think they will look cute and cheerful in the yard. And I'm aiming to have a very cute bee operation here. We're off to a good start!

A Bee-utiful weekend

First of all, Happy Mother's Day! We had a lovely brunch with our local families. The food was great, the kids played well together, the grown-ups got a chance to talk and the weather was perfect. I didn't finish the new kitchen table in time, but we managed without it. I promise to have it in place in time for the next gathering! 

The other big fun of the weekend – BEES!

Jess, my brother-in-law, has a new beekeeping hobby. He has been readying a hive and his first bees arrived on Saturday. The whole family headed over to watch him (literally) pour a box full of bees into the hive. A truly amazing thing to witness. Thousands of bees and not a single person got stung! I'll be taking notes this summer. This was so cool that we just might get a hive of our own next year. You can read all about Jess' bee adventures on his blog, Be A Participant, Not A Recipient.