Frances and the Bee

 Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow... Tennyson    Our Hives Photo Courtesy Mr. T

This time of year, everyone seems to be asking us, "What do you do with the bees for winter?"   First, don't forget that the bees were getting for winter with their work over the summer!  We left approximately 60 pounds of honey in each hive for them to eat during the long Minnesota winter.  They have also been hard at work sealing every miniscule crack in the hive with propolis - it's very sticky stuff.   Unlike the dwellings of some other stinging insects, the honeybee hive is year-round.  The bees themselves cut down in number, carting the deceased or lazy outside and dumping them outside the entrance.  The remaining bees huddle with the queen and do a sort of hibernation.  Bees become quite inactive, but they are able to survive by clustering together and doing their normal work of regulating the temperature of the hive. It can be hard to winter bees in Minnesota, but we are going for it!  "Discarded" Honeybees   To...

Thought I'd do a search for some bee comics to share with you...   From The Far Side     From Tundra   

We love it here in Minnesota when the wind changes and things begin to look and smell like Autumn, but we also are reminded that winter is on it's way. This year Mr. Bee and I are not only bracing ourselves for the coming winter, but we're mindful of how to help our bees get ready, too. Mr. Bee made new bottom boards to keep the hives closer to the ground (for warmth), and we stopped to replace the sugar syrup for the bees (for food). New Bottom Boards  Not the best choice in shoes for hive inspection. Busy Girls.  On inspection, we did see larvae and eggs. Those tiny little faces can be pretty intimidating, no? Right now won't do much more for the bees now other than feed them sugar syrup and pollen "patties".  Photo: Courtesy Mr. T.  The bees have been thirsty and like visiting his bird bath.  Looks like a good place to get a drink! You can see in the photo above that the leaves are changing color all around, to beautiful...

  Last weekend was really special for us.    On Saturday, our beekeeping mentor, Mr. M., invited us out so Mr. Bee could help him pull apart and inspect his hives and ready the capped honey frames for harvest.  After Mr. Bee saw exactly what to look for, we went right over to our hives to see what - if - we could harvest.   We did not take any honey from the North Hive.  Though we're not confident they'll make it through the winter, we're going to let them try. The South Hive gave us almost 6 frames of honey to harvest. That's not a lot, but we were thrilled.  I told Mr. Bee while he was pulling the frames, "I'm not going to lie...I'll be disappointed if we don't get to take any honey this year." We didn't feel disappointed at all. Mr. Bee and a frame we harvested, heavy with honey. The night we took the frames out, the temps were still in the upper 70's after a day of summer heat, and we noticed the bee...

It was a beautiful day here today...AND we have a laying queen again in our North Hive! We know this because we saw plenty of eggs and larvae...and we saw her ! She's the queen we purchased at the County Fair and she's marked with red. Can you find her?    She moved over a little in his one, but Mr. Bee will help you this time. Here's a frame with capped honey from our South Hive. They're doing great.     Today we put another honey super on that South Hive, so we're thinking they have a good chance to make it through the winter.     Driving out in the country lets us see just how quickly the season is about to change.  There are hints of yellow and deep autumn red appearing everywhere. While Mr. Bee was adding the honey super, the kiddos and I found this neat plant.  I'm not sure what it's called - let me know if you do - but it looks like a bunch of tiny windows.  It was a beautifu...

After erroneously destroying some queen cells that our North Hive needed, we'd been brainstorming how to help them pick up their numbers again with a new, fertile queen.  The choice of many beekeepers, and a handy option for us this time is to purchase a new one. We are part of the Tri-County Beekeepers Association, who happened to have a display case at our county fair the beginning of the month.  We visited their booth to talk with some experienced beekeepers about what we should do, and a man there offered to sell us the frame - with a marked, fertile queen - to try and place it in our hive. Mr. Bee learned from this fellow beekeeper that we should place one layer of newspaper over our North Hive's highest box and then place another box on top of that to hold the frame with the new queen and bees. If we were to put the frame in our hive as-is, the bees would most likely work to destroy all of the new bees and likely the queen since they wouldn't reco...

Last inspection, we cut off some cells that looked like queen or swarm cells, and this inspection we've learned a hard lesson...     This photo is from the South Hive.  The "underdog" of our hives, it now has some frames packed with honey, and heavy even for Mr. Bee to hold.  The photo hardly shows how this frame was gleaming in the sun with all that sweet honey. Heavy with Honey In the North Hive, we realized there are no eggs and no larvae remaining.  Our conclusion is that the queen cells we destroyed were not just extras or swarm cells, but necessary work for the bees to replace a queen.  With no eggs or larvae, we can see that there hasn't been a laying queen for weeks.  The photo below shows a queen cell, though, and it appears that the bee growing inside has already emerged. We are hoping that the bees started right at it again after the setback and have a new queen in the works.  The older bees will be dying off each day...

  Our bees have been busy, so I'm sharing some photos from our most recent inspection. The bees need at least 60 pounds of honey to make it through the winter, so we're doing our best to help them reach that goal.  We're hoping for even more honey than that, so that we can share in the bounty, but we are really hoping that we can get these girls through the winter.   Here's a photo of some white-capped honeycomb.  Isn't is beautiful? This is just what the bees spend so much energy on to produce and protect...and I love to have it in my morning coffee and on a hot piece of buttered toast.  Capped Honeycomb     Below is a photo of the queen excluder.  Not all beekeepers use these, but we're giving it a try. We put this on top of the second deep super.  The space is big enough for a worker bee to pass through, but not the queen (hence, queen excluder).  This helps ensure that any boxes placed above it are filled with honey st...

The North Hive Gets a Honey Super - Photo by Mr. Bee Our North Hive was ready for the first honey super!  This is the next box we've added which the girls will stock not with brood, but food stores. A bee's main food store is honey.  We'll reserve this honey for the bees for winter, so we're crossing our fingers that they can fill it up and we can add another box to harvest for ourselves.  (Fingers still crossed.) Today I'll share a little about the differences between honey bees and the other insects they are sometimes confused with. Many of these tips come from Beekeeping For Dummies . Many people mistakenly lump all insects with stingers into the "bee" category. Honeybees are usually gentle in nature, and true bees are covered in hair and they use pollen and nectar from plants as their food source.  Away from their hive, they are non-aggressive.  They are not apt to sting, since they die afterwards, unless they feel the hive or their honey is be...