Frances and the Bee

It has been since spring that I made an entry here. We have enjoyed another full season of beekeeping, which we are close to wrapping up. Here are some summarized notes about this season: We started with two hives and a destructive visit from a bear (see previous post). The bees weathered the bear's disturbance really well. For the hive that was spilled all over, the queen was not injured, so the bees went on building the colony and I think that the reduction in numbers may have helped them not need to swarm. Both hives spent the summer on the farm. The hive that was left untouched was pretty feisty to start the year but became one of the most pleasant hives to work that we have ever had. I am really hoping we can get these bees through winter so that we can have more time with them. The farm continues to be a beautiful refuge for the bees, and we enjoy our moments there, too. The kids get to play and learn, and us adults get to stop and visit a while. This year has had some especi...

An updated post is, again, long overdue. We celebrated our 10-year anniversary at the end of July and took some time out of town to celebrate. It also means that by the time we returned, we started looking towards the end of the season for this year's beekeeping. Here are the official results from this year's hives: Let's just go ahead right away and say how awesome the second (from left) hive was -amazing queen, ideal temperament. It was as tall as Mr. Bee! We are definitely going to try to winter this colony. We are also considering whether or not to try to winter the fourth hive, which Little Miss Bee has titled as her own. Not too shabby for production, but these bees are on the aggressive side, though, so we have that to consider. The first hive was a struggle from the start. We tried to requeen it, which worked, but was not effective. This hive never took off and never seemed to be concerned about it. They had no honey stores by the end of the season, w...

  We have finished our harvesting for this season, and we're thankful for another year of beekeeping. For the first time, we ended up with two colors of honey this year.  The lighter and darker golden honey came from the two harvests, one early and one late August. Not only is this really neat, but it highlights the way that bees access various plants, flowers and trees - and different varieties of nectar - throughout the year. The girls have been gathering the last bits of pollen and nectar available outside, and they are certainly preparing for winter.  Here is some of the last nectar we'll see this year:  ...and some of the last flowers: We are certainly holding on to fall, but this is the time of year when Minnesota beekeepers make decisions for winter.  We did an inspection two days ago, and here is what we found: Hive 1, we'll call it, is looking fine.  The bees have stored up more honey and the queen ha...

Well, August is here and we have updates! Days after my last update, we got a call from Mr. T. He had been walking through the yard and noticed something out of the corner of his eye.  One of our hives swarmed.  This doesn't mean they flew at someone in an angry cloud like we used to see in cartoons.  It means they had made a new queen and half of the hive left with her...and they were temporarily in this tree: Photo Courtesy Mr. T. Bees are not aggressive in this state since they don't have a hive to protect anymore, but this was not good news.  There are ways to collect a swarm and re-hive it, and some beekeepers get all their bees this way, but this was a difficult location, a difficult time of day, and an unlikely success.  The bees normally move on quickly to a home in the wild, and they did move on just a hour or so before we were able to get there. Although we like to look at this in a positive way, that we helped contribute a new hive to the wi...

Here it is!  We are just starting to get this year's harvest into jars.  The beauty below is just part of what fell/dripped/was scraped off during de-capping the frames for harvest. It is slightly cloudy-looking just from the tiny particles of wax...and it's delicious! I think it's a touch sweeter than last year's honey, but it does still taste like wildflowers. I also made my first try at honey candy.  Candy making has been a challenge for me in the past, so it was exciting that it turned out.  Isn't the color beautiful?  The only ingredients were honey and butter. They remind me of Werther's, but they have a beautiful, strong, wildflower taste.  The fragrant recipe will be lovely to make in the fall and they should be soothing for winter's dry throats. The photo below is what we're looking at as of late.  The right-most hive is gone and we made the frames available for the bees to eat the last drops of honey off of so we can store them ...

Last weekend, Minnesota weather was fully hot. We have been keeping only an occasional eye on our hives the last couple of weeks, but we decided it was the time to start getting the hives ready for the end of the season.   The hive that is right-most in the photo above is the first one we inspected and evaluated, and you can see a frame from it below. This sporadic and bumpy pattern makes it look like the worker bees are laying eggs.  This is bad because there should be an efficiently-laying queen to make more worker bees.  When a worker or workers start laying eggs, only drones (male bees) are produced, and the hive is doomed because there will be no more workers to stock up honey for the cold season.  This hive will not make it through winter, so we took the honey frames off of the top and set them aside for harvesting.  We also put some of the frames that these girls had started with comb and uncured honey and put them on the center hive, so...