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...

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...

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...

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...