Frances and the Bee

  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...

We've had a beautiful week of summer. I haven't been personally out to see our bees in weeks, so it was a wonderful surprise to see the amount of wildflowers that have sprung up in front of our hives. It was a great choice on the part of Mr. T to stop mowing that area - in part so he doesn't get "anyone" - namely, the bees - upset, but also because it's particularly beautiful these days!   Don't these hives seem comfortable here?     The hives are looking great and are our girls are busy working on filling up the second deep supers that we provided.  I think we'll be ready for our first honey supers this next week! This next photo shows some new comb, being "drawn out." They built a little cell small enough to squeeze into and deep enough to hold brood, honey, pollen, or nectar. This photo is interesting to me because I feel like my eyes find the comb first - and the stinger on that bee!  Isn't this honey...

We've added the next supers (boxes) and frames to the hives so the bees can work on filling them up with more brood (eggs and larvae) and honey.  In the meantime, here are a couple honey bee facts: There are three characters in a honey bee colony: The Queen - Her job is to lay eggs.  Her attendants even feed her and clean up after her so she can keep working. She is the fertile female of the colony, and there is one queen per hive. A good queen can lay 2,000 to 3,000 eggs each day. The Worker - Worker bees (the ones you see flying outside collecting pollen) are infertile females.  They are in charge of many tasks, such as housekeeping, guarding the hive, feeding the queen, drones, and brood, maintaining hive temperature, collecting pollen and nectar...etc. The Drone - The male bees whose only purpose is to mate with a queen. Only one in one thousand actually get the chance to mate.  Drones hang out around the hive, eat, and get kicked out ...

We're in the throngs of end-of-the-year activities for our kids... Miss Bee is graduating and celebrating, Little Miss Bee had her first-ever dance recital and wants to be continually outside, and Little Mr. Bee is now crawling... yikes! If all of these things weren't reason enough to have beautiful memories and hopes for the future, we're really rooting for our honey bees. There is evidence of spring (finally) everywhere.  By the time I'm posting this, the maples have already let their seeds to the wind. Mr. Bee's new feeders have been working great, as you can see below.  Although it's still been quite rainy, the sunny days here and there mean the bees have to get their numbers up.  High numbers mean more workers, which means more pollen, nectar, and honey to help them survive the winter.   I apologize that the following photo is blurry.  Maybe you can pretend there's some mystical sort of filter on the lens to make it all look magical......

It has been too rainy here lately... Well, not in general.  We did have a drought in Minnesota last year, so we need all the moisture we can get.  For our bees, it's another story.  They can't fly in the rain, so they are forced to stay in the hive. We had a cloudy afternoon without rain over the weekend, so Mr. Bee and I ran out to check our new feeders and take a peek at the inside of the hives. I really noticed the sounds and smells of the hives this time.  My First In-Flight Bee Photo - I love it. Coming in for a Landing - I love this shot, too! Through my camera lens, I saw a lot of pollen coming into both hives. This isn't shown in the photo above, but believe me, it was there. Mr. Bee Mr. Bee is proud of his work to correct a problem we had with the Pro-Feeders. We had too many bees drowning and the size we chose left too much space between the remaining frames. Mr. Bee did a lot of thinking and came up w...

 We had a break in the rainy weather yesterday and made haste to do our first inspection of each of our hives.  We rushed through the South hive but did really well with the North Hive.  We saw eggs, larvae, pollen- and nectar-filled comb, and a lot of working bees in both hives. The sound of their buzzing was awesome and slightly intimidating, but once we were in there, I felt like I was in my element.  Mr. Bee, About to Open the South Hive Beekeepers use smoke because it drives the bees down into the hive. Their survival instinct upon sensing smoke is to fill their stomachs, which makes them a bit more calm during inspections.    We were disappointed to see that the size of feeder we chose allowed for too much space between the frames.  You can see to the top of the photo below, the appropriate amount of "bee space", and to the right bottom where the bees are busy filling up the extra space with comb.  South Hive Here ...