Frances and the Bee

Last week, we were back down to freezing temperatures, which was a little scary knowing about all the new bees waiting to hatch. This week, in typical Minnesota fashion, temperatures are back up and the bees have been busy.  Below, you can see a new bee hatching, or emerging. Can you see her antennae and front eyes sticking out? Both hives are looking healthy and I'm guessing we'll add another super to each by next weekend. They have also been working hard to clean up some of the comb from last year that we put in the hive to try and give them a head start.  They're doing a wonderful job.  We are enjoying the progress of the bees, and also the progress of spring and the hope of summer.  Little Miss Bee is just over a week away from finishing Kindergarten.  We're starting to eat watermelon and playing outside as much as we can. We hope you are enjoying this season, too!

Our bees are busy... In the photo below, on the right side, you can see a bee entering into the hive with some nice, light yellow pollen on her leg.  Hooray! The trees have already passed the budding stage here, dandelions are in bloom (to my delight but the dismay of many), and more wildflowers are on the way.  In case you're choosing flowers for your garden, honeybees like blue and purple blooms the best.  It looks like both queens are busy laying eggs and, any day now, new honeybees will start emerging from their cells and will get to work.  Since a good queen could lay 1000 eggs each day, we would hope that about that many bees would be added every day once the hatching rotation is in full swing. A honeybee's first job is to clean out her cell. Below is a photo of a brood frame from one hive.  You can see what we'd call a very nice pattern of brood.  That means that there aren't many empty cells, which would be ones  you can see here ...

Mr. Bee and I, and our little bees, are very happy and feeling very blessed to be officially starting our fourth year of beekeeping. We'd like to say a special thank you to Mr. T. for letting us do this on his land.  We appreciate his love of nature and his friendship with our family. Last Sunday we went out to make sure everything was ready for the hives and to let our newly-painted boxes air out a bit. Everyone helped. Little Mr. Bee and Little Miss Bee Mr. Bee picked up our new bees last night and we had gorgeous weather today - just in time to put them in. Introducing...our two new hives! We purchased two 2-pound packages of Carniolan honey bees and I thought it was funny that they traveled from California to Minnesota via "Bee-Bus". We work more efficiently each year at getting the bees in the hives. We remove the can filled with syrup (food for the bees' journey) and carefully remove the queen's separate, very small box.  You can see ...

Hello, again! We're back to planning for the beekeeping year ahead.  Since none of our bees made it through winter, we will be buying new bees and starting each hive brand new this year. There is not a lot of news to share at this point, but we are thinking about having two hives and what is new is that we are considering trying to keep a different "stock" of honeybee.  We haven't made any final decisions yet, but you might be interested in what difference a "stock" or breed of honeybee might make. Beekeepers have known that genetics make a big difference in honeybees - they can affect temperament, disease resistance, and productivity. Although there can always be "exceptions to the rule," here are some quick  characteristics of some of the two types of stocks we are talking about: Italian This is the type of honeybees that we have had every year so far.  When I say we have Italian honeybees, I usually hear jokes about their accent, but thes...

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...

Here's an almost-updated look at the hives. The middle hive, which made it through last winter, got yet another box of frames over the weekend.