Frances and the Bee

Yes, July is here, and so is the summer's main nectar flow. The bees are, as always, working hard to forage and make honey. We have been researching and turning ideas over to find what we can do better now and each season.  This season, we have two hives, the first one being very strong. It has the best temperament of any hive we've had. The queen has an excellent brood pattern and the colony has been steadily growing. This  brings our first attempt at a split, making two hives out of one. Mr. Bee built a great nuc box and we filled it with several frames of eggs and bees from the strong hive, leaving the queen with the original colony. The plan is to relocate the nuc box so that the bees inside make a new queen for themselves out of the eggs we provided. We did move the box and have been waiting to see if this has been successful and what the next step will be. The second hive had a very poor start. Their temperament has been bad their brood pattern h...

Summer is full of activity in Minnesota, for us and for the bees. We have been visiting parks, pools and lakes, fishing, picnicking, and spending as much time as we can outside, and, of course, checking on our bees. We are already in what is one of the main nectar flows in our area. This means it is prime time for bees to be collecting nectar and storing honey. We will be checking on the hives about once a week to make sure that the bees have enough space to work. Honey is often called "liquid gold". It is a very sweet reward for the labor of beekeeping. Many people don't know that there are other simple joys in beekeeping aside from just collecting honey. For example, our second hive is doing remarkably well, and it's really neat to open the cover and see a full box of frames like this: Every year, I look forward to the first time I see an emerging bee. This is the first time I have tried to post a video here, so I hope it works. Here is a short clip where...

I'm thinking back to the day before we got our very first packages of bees, that excitement, and this photo from 2013. Many people ask us how we got into beekeeping. You know how we sometimes talk about things we'll do "someday when we're old"? Places we will go, hobbies we thnk we will have time for, or - if you are like me - plants we will own. Well, beekeeping was one of those things for us. We talked about how neat it would be and how much we would love it. When Mr. T, a family friend on whose land we currently have our bees, bought his home, I casually said, "Let us know if you ever want bees on your land." Immediately, he said, "I do want bees here." We spent that winter reading and researching as much as we could and Mr. T introduced us to Mr. Martin, who would become our beekeeping mentor and friend. That very next spring, there we were - first time and lifelong beekeepers. Many people don't know this, but beeks (short for ...

  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...

I didn't realize it had been so long since my last update. Is it July already? We have been taking more of a hands-off approach to the bees this year, and since our inspections have been so simple and quick, I hadn't been taking photos.  Now, I miss having the photos, so I'm back to it. Both of our hives are doing well.  The queens have been making great patterns and there is already some capped honey in the hives. Below, you can see an excellent coverage of brood comb.  We look for not too many empty spaces. To the left, which is actually the bottom of the frame, are larger cells that hold drone (male) bees. It's normal for the hive to produce these and I will try to get a photo of a drone so you can compare. The rightmost bee is next to a brand new emerging bee, which we know is a female because of the shape of the cap on the comb.  The bee will chew her way out and start her life by cleaning the cell for the queen to lay a new egg in it.  Can you ima...

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 ...

It's been a while since the last post, but there have been updates. The hives have been growing and working, and we've been out about once a week to check on them and make sure they have enough frames to build comb on and (*fingers crossed*) fill with honey. The hive that wintered from last year (in the center of the three) is definitely the strongest. The girls in this hive have been filling up frames and the queen is laying a lot of eggs. We know this because we can see the frames are full of bees. We also know they are doing well and working hard because we can see that the frames are being filled with honeycomb and honey. Isn't that brand new, white comb beautiful? The next photo is a look down through the uppermost box into the next. We're looking straight down, seeing the side of the box on the left and a brand new frame on the right, down into the box and frames below where the bees have already made comb that they're working on filling...

Hello, again!  We've had a busy first couple of weeks with the new bees.  Our new top bar hive is already looking strong.  You can see the pollen nuggets on the bee returning to the hive in the photo below.  The likely source? Maybe trees, or... Dandelions. They're suddenly blooming all over. We were exploring a patch of them and found one of our girls hard at work. This little bee was very busy pollinating - visiting flower after flower, only stopping for a moment at times. Mr. Bee has already been adding the empty frames to the front of the box, so the queen can continue to lay eggs (her laying pattern is VERY good so far) and the workers can build comb and fill it with pollen and nectar. Our wintered hive is doing pretty well, too.  We're keeping a eye on everything, and as some other beekeepers decide to do with strong hives, we've decided to "split" the hive.  We purchased a new queen, put her in a new box, added some frames of ...