Moving the Bee Colony --Video Blog

Like a love-crazed fool I dreamed we might just be able to move the colony of bees across the country with us somehow. 

Commercial colonies get moved all the time.  --We even saw a bee-transport truck when we were on our road-trip for spring break.

(Buzz Buzz)

But of course while I was trying to convince myself of the legitimacy of my plan national news broke with the story of a bee transport fiasco!

So I had to downsize my plan and come up with "plan B".

I lay out my plan here in video blog #3:

Here's the link to the source of the plans I consulted.

*   *   *   *   *

In the end we went with "plan C".  We sold the entire colony to some friends.  I didn't want to weaken the colony by removing a nucleus colony, and then have the remaining colony die on our friends.  It was a really strong colony and probably would have been fine.  But I didn't want to lessen the chances of our friends being successful in beekeeping. 

It was a really difficult thing to do emotionally.  Just feeling like I was giving up something really important in my life, and--most significantly--that I don't know when I will be able to get started with again.

In the end "plan C" was just about as crazy as plan A--it still involved moving a full colony of bees.  

They sell all kinds of fancy equipment for moving bees.  We didn't buy any of it.  We did it our own crazy, cheap way.  

 We waited until night after dark, when the bees were all hopefully in from foraging.  Luckily it wasn't too warm and the bees were not bearding much.

So we stuffed the entrance with a cloth.

Then we separated the super from the brood boxes and wrapped the bottom of the super and top of the brood boxes with packing paper.

(Very quickly trying to not let out all the bees!)

Then we loaded them into our van, and drove them away.  The top super was full of honey, so it weighed as much as the two brood boxes together.  

We got to our friends' house.  Unloaded it, set it up, added the second super.  Instant honey-factory!

It was way more complicated than that!

I had a wardrobe malfunction (user-error) and ended up running around with bees in my hair!  I was swatting at my ponytail with my hive tool trying to remove the rubber band without using my fingers and getting stung.  Also, trying to not scream and freak out the friends who were going to be taking over bee-duty! (We had told them "It's sooo easy!")

And then it was over.  Our bees were no longer ours.

Chemical-Free Beehives

 We worked in the beehive a few weeks ago, as the bees were welcoming spring.  We were hoping to add the first super earlier than two years ago to hold off swarming.

I think we hit it at a good time.  The brood boxes looked full, but not overflowing.

 We also replaced their bottom board with their screened bottom board that we'd taken off for the winter.  I just bought it last summer.  I've been wanting to get one all along, but our local beekeeping supply place didn't cary them.  So I finally ordered one last summer from Dadant.

It does two really great things.  First it helps the hive to receive better airflow in the summer when it's hot and the bees spend a lot of energy just trying to keep the hive cool enough.  But Secondly it helps keep the varroa mite levels down in a super-easy chemical-free beekeeping strategy.

The mites reproduce by laying eggs on a honeybee larva.  When the larva emerges from its cell so do the new mites.  Very frequently they fall the the bottom board and then crawl back up finding a bee to latch on to.  With a screened bottom, you have a large number of mites that simply fall through the screen to the ground and they are not able to find their way back into the colony to terrorize it.

This is how I honeybee-- rubber kitchen gloves and a mosquito net from the Target dollar spot.  Classy!

 Then we actually help the process in a second way.  We dust the bees with powdered sugar.  This encourages self-grooming among the bees which frequently detaches the mites and makes them fall down (and out), and also the powdery layer make some of the mites lose their grip on the bees and fall off.

Dust sifting through the hen's feathers as she walks away.

The interesting thing is, chickens actually use this same method.  They take "dust baths", laying in the dirt and fluffing all their feathers out and getting dirt all under their feathers, and then they go shake it off, and this is is how they instinctually remove mites from themselves.

So in caring for our bees against this modern plague, we look to long-standing natural methods for integrated pest management (aka: a number of complimentary methods), to help keep the pest levels down in our colony.  It's exciting that our colony has survived through three winters already and we've never had to use any chemical control in our hive.

I don't know what we will do with our hive when we move.  The crazy part of me wants to take them with us!

But maybe it would be ok to sell them--I'm interested to try some additional beekeeping methods such as natural-sized cells and top bar hives like the warre hive, which encourage strong hives without chemical management as well.

Sweet Harvest: Honey 2013

In honor of National Honey Bee Day on Saturday, we decided to harvest honey from our beehive.  Our friends whom we borrow the extractor from are getting ready to move, so it was a kind of now or never situation.  

We harvested over five gallons!  And we are actually not through all of last years' harvest either--there's about a gallon left of that as well. 

Last year we harvested everything into one pot and jarred it.  But this year we noticed some particularly light frames of honey. (This frame has the two colors inter-mixed.) 

 We decided to try and harvest the lighter frames first and bottle them before extracting the rest of the honey. 

We got four quarts of beautiful golden yellow honey.  And the taste of it is amazing and difficult to describe.  It's like the sweetness is higher(?) than the other honey. . . Yeah, I sound looney. 

The rest of the honey still looked pretty light to me, however, so I pulled out a jar of last years' honey to compare to. 

It was definitely way darker last year.  I couldn't help exclaiming to my boys, "Isn't nature amazing?!"  Things created in nature are unique, not exactly the same.  God gives us variety for beauty. 

It's a shame that the honey on grocery store shelves is all exactly the same color. 

I'm actually really excited about the lighter honey.  As I've been working the last few years on converting recipes to use honey, I've been frustrated by some of the results.  Some desserts like custard and chocolate pudding are completely overwhelmed by the strong honey flavor, and end up tasting just like eating honey with more body.  It tastes good, but it's not what I'm looking for. 

Darker honey is known for being more nutritious, but definitely having a stronger flavor.  (It's especially good for making whole wheat bread.)  So hopefully I can have some more successes using the lighter honey for lighter dessert things.  

Spring on the Backyard Farm

 Our city farming chores began this spring with re-queening our beehive.  The colony successfully survived it's second winter, which makes us happy, and content with our version of beekeeping that is a little more hands-off than many beekeepers.  However, after the swarming and subsequent self-re-queening that occurred last summer, we ended up with a pretty  grouchy colony in the fall.  Our first attempts to check in on them this spring reconfirmed their general anti-social genepool so we made the decision to re-queen.

We ordered our new queen and tried to keep her alive long enough for it to stop raining so we could do the ol' switcheroo.  What we needed to do was systematically go through the hive to find the old queen, dispatch her, leave the hive queen-less for two days until they were getting nervous about not having a queen around, then introduce the new queen causing a wave of relief amid the bees to increase their likelihood of "accepting" her. 

We don't use marked queens, so in our three seasons of beekeeping, we've only seen our queen one other time, so we knew it was going to be difficult to find her.  Adding to that the grouchy (read: sting-happy) colony, and poor spring weather we knew we were in for quite the needle in a haystack hunt.  But we suited up, ultimately prevailed, and I was the only one that ended up getting stung.  (On my big belly of course, because I couldn't button up my bee shirt over the baby!)  But, the colony is now busily buzzing away for the season.

 The chickens all weathered the winter fine and began laying again mid-February.  But mid-March we went on vacation for spring break.  We were only going to be gone a few days so we simply filled up the chickens' water and food and left.  We came back to a big pile of 14 eggs in the laying box, and thought it had all gone off smoothly.

 Until we realized that the two bantams (our 3rd-year mini-hens) wouldn't leave the nesting box, and had stopped laying their little miniature eggs.  That big pile of eggs in the nesting box made their mothering instincts kick into gear, so all they could think about was raising baby chicks.  So they stopped laying eggs, and would sit all day in the nesting box trying to hatch the (unfertilized) eggs the other hens were laying.

Florence finally broke out of this broody nonsense about 4-5 weeks after we got back, but Gertrude, here, is still going strong in her broodiness.  We may have to take some drastic measures (more drastic than me going out a couple of times a day and just tossing her out into the run off the laying box) to get her to knock it off.

Since we don't know how long we'll be here we didn't get any laying hen chicks this year--but it's really hard to resist those baby chicks at the farm store.   Jeremy decided he really wanted to raise a few meat birds instead.  So we just picked up the one breed our store carried--the Cornish Cross.

We were already a bit morally opposed to the breed (they're the ones that have been bred to grow so quickly that they often die of heart attacks before reaching their 7-week accelerated maturation date because their hearts just can't keep up), but after raising them we are even more certain that we would never buy that breed again.  The crazy thing is, they not only grow too fast for their heart, but I think they grow too fast for their brains too!  They were so stupid--for lack of a better word--but when you thought about it, it made sense because they were really just baby chicks still, but had the bodies of full-grown chickens.

They just seemed a little more sickly as well.  We never put them around the other chickens--there's a risk of the chicks having disease from their hatchery, so since they weren't going to be permanent members of the flock, we didn't risk putting them together.  They had really watery droppings.  But once they got big enough that we let them start wandering the yard a little bit (so they were eating grass and things) their droppings solidified.  That just reconfirmed the validity of some of our chicken-raising practices as well. 

Sadly, (icky real-life stuff ahead warning) we came home from church last week to find the chickens had been attacked.  Our best guess is it was a yappy- neighborhood dog, because it attacked all four of them, they were all wounded on their back-sides (like they were running away from something), but it wasn't actually able to kill any of them--it left that job for Jeremy and me.  So, we processed the birds, cutting the meat away from their nipped backsides, freezing the rest, and making stock from the carcasses. 

One of the saddest things about this is that one of the reasons we raise our own birds, is to give them a less traumatic existence and death than the commercial alternative.  We want them to live happily and die peacefully.  So, unfortunately this was not a calm, humane death for our chickens, we don't know how long they were out there wounded after being attacked.  But, these are the realities of keeping animals, and on a country farm it would just be foxes and hawks we'd be dealing with instead.  This simply is the reality of animal husbandry.

But these experiences do make us feel like we've earned the right to call ourselves backyard "farmers". 

 

And since we have no immediate plans to leave we added summer crops to our vegetable garden.   The peas, broccoli, cabbage, onions, and kale were already doing well, so we added tomatoes, peppers, basil, and some runner beans.  We will still be adding more, but this spring was really crazy.  We got snow 10 days after our "last annual frost date" this year!  So everything is a bit behind.

And who knows with the baby coming (this week, maybe? please!) this may be all the planting we get to this summer.  But, there's always fall crops!

Honey, Honey!

Jeremy and I checked on our bees on Monday.   We were looking for one thing--Honey!  We added a superstructure on top of the two hive bodies when we got back from vacation.  The honey from the supers is what we will extract and harvest for our own use.

The bees had been busy drawing comb on the new frames in the super.  It always takes them longer the first year because they have to form all new honeycomb,  Later years they have a base layer of honeycomb to just add on to so they can get started with the honey-making sooner. 

We saw the very first two cells of capped honey in the super.  The bees won't cap it until it until it's ready.  They fan it with their wings to evaporate excess water which would cause the honey to ferment.  When it's ready they know, and then they cap it.

I'll admit I was a little disappointed that there wasn't any more capped honey already.

But then we started inspecting the other hive bodies and found that the upper hive body was entirely filled with capped honey!  That's good for a number of reasons.  First we know that they will have enough food this winter.  Second, we know that from here on out, for the rest of the summer, the bees are working for us!  So we will definitely be getting honey this year. 

We had been looking for honey because our friends were going to do some extracting that night.  They sell at the farmers' market and were running low on honey for sale.  So despite not having honey of our own to harvest --yet-- Jeremy and I each took turns heading down to work with our friends to begin learning to process of extraction.

Since it really was helpful to have a few hours of help, they gave Jeremy a quart of honey for his time.  The boys wanted to try some right away, but since it was bedtime we suggested they wait until the next day.  We didn't have any bread for toast, but I'm an Arizona girl, and I can't think of anything better to enjoy golden raw honey on than hot fresh Indian fry bread!

When I was little living up in the White Mountains we called them "Navajo Tacos" because they would serve the fry bread topped with beans, cheese, lettuce and tomatoes with a dollop of sour cream on top.  They would serve them in the lodge at the ski slopes we went to on the reservation.  After skiing we were always hungry enough for the taco version, but the dessert version of the fry bread with honey drizzled on top can't be beat for a sweet treat.

My mom got her recipe for fry bread from the newspaper in AZ.  Sometimes newspaper recipes can turn out the very best!  This is one of those times.  So here is my mom's Indian Fry Bread Recipe, and.  Don't forget to follow all hot oil kitchen safety rules--especially with kids around.   

Indian Fry Bread
Serves 8

4 cups flour
1 Tbl baking powder
1 tsp salt
2 Tbl powdered milk
1 1/4 -1 1/2 cups warm water
Shortening or other frying oil

Melt shortening or other oil in a large skillet, dutch oven,  or wok.  (Should be at least 3/4 inch of oil.)  Heat to 500*F.

Meanwhile, combine flour, baking powder, salt and milk powder in large mixing bowl.  (You can do this by hand or with a dough hook.)  Gradually stir in warm water.  Mix until dough forms a ball and comes clean from edge of bowl.  Knead until elastic.  Divide dough into 8 pieces.  Pat into circles and roll to 1/4 inch thickness.  

Slip one dough circle into hot fat.  Turn once when underside is brown.  Remove from oil, drain on paper towels.  Repeat with remaining dough.

Bugging our Bees -- Hive Inspections

It's been five weeks since we became backyard beekeepers.  What I love most is the opportunity that it has given us to learn so much about something we really didn't know about before.  I've read four books on beekeeping from our library already to learn about what we're doing.  We rented a Nova Program "Tales from the Hive" and watched that with the boys.   They loved getting to see the bees up close like that since we don't let them go near our actual hive.  Jeremy and I, on the other hand, will go out every day and stand behind the bee hive and peer over the top, watching the bees come and go. 

 It's fascinating to watch them work. The bees carrying pollen fly so clumsily.  They clunk down with a hard landing and waddle in to deposit their wares.  You can't see the nectar that the other foragers carry--but I trust them.  The guard bees stand out in front feeling everybody that comes to the entrance making sure they belong.

Lately we've noticed some bees that stand out front, face towards the entrance, stick their rear ends up in the air and just beat their wings continuously.   They are creating an airflow away from the hive fanning out the entrance. 

Our bees reached the end of their "new bee" phase so we had a number of things we needed to go do with the hive this weekend.  We came out to the hive to see two large masses of bees hanging on the outside of the box.  Jeremy called to me and asked me if they were swarming (the great fear of beekeepers everywhere) but they were just hot.  When they can't keep the temperature down inside the hive, some of the bees have to go hang out outside.  The right temperature range inside the hive is important for the developing "brood" --the baby bees. 

But that did tell us that we definitely needed to do the two tasks we had on the agenda: remove the entrance reducer and add a second hive body.  We had an entrance reducer in because that's supposed to help the bees defend their new hive a little better while their numbers are still low.  We waited to add a second box to encourage the bees to draw comb, essentially form the new honeycomb, on all the bottom frames before moving up into another box.  The bees have a tendency to stay to the middle and move upwards when the chance is available.  However, if you wait too long to add another box on top the bees feel crowded and start thinking about swarming off. 

 So Jeremy got into the hive and started checking on things.  At Jeremy's first visit, two weeks after installing the bees, he was still learning the ropes, working on the techniques of everything he was supposed to be doing.  So he didn't come out of it with a very good idea of the state of the brood-rearing (which is kind of the most-important point of the initial hive inspection).

 This time we were able to get a good look at the bees in all stages of development.  The queen lays eggs which hatch into little larvae, which grow bigger, then they make a cocoon become "pupae" and the worker bees cap their cell with wax.  When they are finished developing into bees they chew their way out of the cells.  We were able to see all stages of development going on.  Including watching a little bee chew out of it's cell!  We also saw some drone cells as well.  The male drones have larger bodies, so instead of having a flat cap over their cell, they have a more bulbous cap.

We've not actually seen the queen yet, but the fruits of her labor are self-evident of her presence.  We'll get better at spotting her.  We got the second hive body box on--so it's looking even more like a "real" beehive now.  We're starting to almost feel like legitimate beekeepers.

 I hang out and watch Jeremy work and have him show me things.  I shout out orders and directions from all the books and blogs I've read like a good wife does.  I need my own veil so I can be more involved--thought I don't think I'll get a suit.  The bees are most defensive of the fan-shaped area extending out from their entrance.  I always stay away from that front area. That's good enough to have the bees let you alone most of the time (although when you crack open the hive you are totally in their defensive zone).

There is another interesting fact about where we placed the hive.  We faced it towards that tall fence.  It's about 10 feet from it.  Doing so encourages the bees when they fly out of the hive to then fly up over the fence.  This encourages the bees to fly off at a level above people and animals.  That is an important trick for suburban beekeepers like us to be aware of.    It's no guarantee but it's worth a shot.

There was a small amount of burr comb between two of the frames.  It sticks the frames together so you can't remove and inspect them so Jeremy scraped it off.  (That made the bees mad.).  He brought the comb inside dripping with sweet nectar and let everyone have a taste.  The boys were so excited to get their first taste of "honey" from our bees. 

We hope there'll be more where that came from!

All-Natural High

 It's been a little over a week since Jeremy installed our colony of bees.  Jeremy contemplated the task while brushing the sides of the "package" with sugar syrup to calm the bees.  He chose to go suitless and gloveless for the install.  Bees in a package are less defensive than ordinarily because they don't technically have a home to protect, and if you feed them some sugar syrup they feel even better about life.

In a different vein Jeremy wanted to feel "in control" and not clumsy when in stalling the bees.  The gloves particularly make that more difficult.

 I stayed outside to watch Jeremy, along with the baby who would not allow me to put him down after the 6-hour car ride.  We didn't stand too close, but we did send the older boys inside to watch from the window.  Just in case.

 It was a little tough to get the syrup can out of the package, but once it was out bees started flying out.

 We chose the "chicken method" of installing our colony which involves taking out a few of the frames and just placing the whole package of bees inside, putting the hive lid on and leaving them to get out on their own.

A number of people have asked us how you know the bees are going "like" their new home and take to it.  There were two things we did to encourage this.  We installed the package in the early evening when the bees have a natural inclination to want to bunker down for the night as opposed to gather the whole colony to go swarm in a nearby tree or something.  Also we brushed down all the inner frames with the sugar water--and what bee can resist that?

 Jeremy took a few minutes to watch the little bees start exploring their new home just a bit. Then he came inside riding an all-natural adrenaline high.

He paced back and forth in the front room telling me how it felt to be there and open the package with his heart racing.  To have the bees fly out and around, some of them landing on his arms just as curious about him as he was about them.  And to have done it, completed the task, done something real that was a goal we've been scheming about, and supporting a modern idea of food production that we believe in. 

He said this must be why boys these days play video games and jump out of airplanes--they are missing out on the types of experiences that mankind used to participate in simply to provide for their basic physical needs.  People today don't get that rush of exhilaration from interacting with wild but beneficial insects, or hunting down an animal to feed your family, or looking at a shelf full of the fruits of their labor guaranteed to provide for the-as of yet unseen, but guaranteed to come-needs of their family. 

Here's to hoping that our children don't feel the need to seek out man made highs, but that can experience the natural thrill that comes from wrangling nature to directly provide for some of their own needs. 
 

Backyard Beekeeping

At some point we are going to cross the threshold of "weird."  Perhaps we've already done it.

Recently I was talking to Jeremy about "the Bees" and Owen asked, "What bees?"

I said "Oh I don't think we've told you yet--We've going to get a beehive and keep bees."

To which Owen replied,  "Oh, right, because we're farmers now."  Apparently none of this is at all weird to him.  (Also, I wonder what it was that has made us farmers now in his mind.)

I've been interested in beekeeping for a long time.  But it doesn't really seem like one of those things you can just jump in to.  We have some friends that keep bees, and have asked them to walk us through the steps of caring for a colony.  We've also checked out a bunch of books, but getting the assistance of someone with years and colonies worth of experience just gives us the real kick of confidence we need to try it out.

So we've ordered hive components.  Assembled hive boxes and frames, and painted the hive (with leftover house paint in the basement, free = sweet!)

Today we drive to pick up the bees.  It's pretty late in the season.  But there was bad weather in California where the bees are coming from.  This evening Jeremy will install our colony.  (I designated him as head of this hobby.)  And then we will officially become backyard beekeepers.