Summer Update

It has been a hot, dry summer and we have been trying to stay both busy and cool. Those two things don't often go together in early August, but we try to soak in as much warmth as we can during this time, in hopes that it will keep us warm when the seasons change. The way that nature continues on in its cycles continues to be motivating and beautiful, just like the monarch caterpillars and butterfly above. Our garden beds are booming and we have stayed in awe of the plants growing and the honey bees working as hard as ever throughout all the difficulty of the last year. 

Here is one bed in our garden. This snapshot features our son, and it's back in May when the tomatoes were having a good start...

 ...and now. We have to get the ladder out to harvest these!

In years past, I have talked about each of our honey bee hives individually, giving specific details about how we have made decisions.  Having six distinct hives, it would be too much explanation. Instead, I will give general updates this time.

Regarding the swarm we caught (photos in the last post) - It had been very aggressive, and we thought we would need to re-queen it, but we first combined it with our other weakest hive, making sure to include eggs and queen cells.  Between inspections, the bees took care of it, got themselves queen-right and producing honey, and had a total shift in behavior.

There are two hives that seemed to be a little behind. We thought they weren't successful, but they had been making comb and storing food, so we waited it out. These, also, were simply working on getting their queens established (hatched, mated, and laying eggs), and now both are in great shape and are producing some honey. Although these two took the longest to get established, the temperaments of the two colonies are my favorite. They are very calm!

We did have one hive that we thought was in trouble, so we brought it back to our home to monitor it. It turns out these bees just needed a little more time to get the queen ready to lay eggs. That hive now has eggs and is busy working around our yard and the neighbors' flower gardens. It is really fun to have a hive at home to watch work daily, and since they don't have much honey stored, they aren't aggressive.  

The theme between the swarm and all of the splits is that, this season, we gave the bees time to manage things themselves. Sometimes we make adjustments to our hives, but not being in too much of a rush to do that has worked well this year.

The last two remaining hives are quite strong. One was about as tall as my husband by mid June! We were amazed to be able to pull honey for the first time at the end of June. Maybe the bees felt ahead-of-time that we would have a drought year? Either way, these two hives (the tallest and the one with his elbow resting on it in the photo below) are full and busy.

This has been a strong year for us in that;

-We caught our first swarm!

-We had successful splits.  Learning to split a hive into two was a vital skill for us once we got our hives through winter. It allowed us to keep our bees and reduce the risk of them swarming. 

-We started taking notes. With so many hives to keep track of, we have been keeping a notebook with brief notes from each hive so we can remember what is going on and so we can plan ahead for supplies. It has been very helpful.

- I saw some amazing pollen colors during inspection. Check out this orange!

-We had the earliest first honey pull ever. A common misconception about beekeeping is that we can go and get honey whenever we need it.  Instead, we have a harvest time, which is normally at the end of summer. To save ourselves the work of harvesting everything at once, we sometimes start pulling excess honey as soon as the bees have it ready. The frames we pulled in June were beautiful - capped honey from end to end.

-We were reminded to not forget to add all the frames back into the boxes.  With the empty space we had left in a hive for about a week, the bees had a change to build natural comb (not on frames and in it's natural, maze-y, wavy shapes). It is really fascinating!

This photo is upside-down so you can see how the comb was built hanging inside the hive from the top inner cover.

This is where the natural comb was connected to the frames below it.

The natural comb was already full of eggs and we decided to leave it in it's own empty super at the top of the hive. It's a fun experiment to see how they build it and manage it, and it's a small way to show respect to what these amazing creatures can do even if we don't have any part in it. 

-We stayed up on our "tick checks." It was a really big year for wood and deer ticks around here. I even had to remove several of them (imagine a green-faced emoji here).

What comes next:

-We will harvest honey one more time later this month before we leave the rest and feed the bees in preparation for winter.

-We will need to decide which of the five hives are viable for wintering. As of right now, we think all of them will be, which is amazing!  We'll reduce their space to persuade them into the lowest three supers.  This makes them able to focus on filling that area with winter stores and it makes it much easier for us to transport the hives back to our home for fall feeding and winter.

-As soon as this time of year comes, we are talking about what we hope for in the coming year, what changes we'll make, how many hives we hope to run.  With so many going into winter, these still feel like fresh topics. 

We have had many conversations this year about how we are thankful and proud to be doing beekeeping together as a couple. We lean on each other, bounce ideas off of each other, and celebrate our hard work together. I will say that Mr. Bee does the majority of heavy lifting (literally and figuratively).  

As I gather my thoughts to prepare a beekeeping presentation for later this month, I was struck by how honey bees and beekeeping have made for us a very special connection not just to nature, but also to one other and to many others in the community. I am excited to have the chance to share about it here and on so many occasions.

In the next post, we'll likely be wrapping up the season. Until then, take good care!