Frances and the Bee

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...

In my last post, we were holding our breath to see if spring had really arrived.  Update: it did arrive!  The unseasonably warm weather made a swift end to winter and gave all of our hives (as well as ourselves) an unpredicted boost. For the first time ever, all of our hives survived the winter.  We were checking on the hives and had a hunch that we needed to get to splitting the hives, but it seemed too early.  It turns out the bees were quite ready to split. It was wonderful and, on Mother's Day, forced us to "level up" our beekeeping - in more ways than one! We were finishing our family time together outside when our company noticed "the bees were really busy."  Mr. Bee and I saw that they were coming rapidly out of one of the hives and flying up and around...and away.  We could even hear a difference. This was a swarm. Swarming is the honey bees' usual way to reproduce and make more colonies. Imagine a hive has survived winter.  The weather is warm...

The springtime weeks when tiny green leaves sprout all about just never get old.  These flowers bloom first in our yard. They are only a few inches tall but, trust me, they are packed with hope for warmer weather and brighter moments to come.  The unseasonably warm weather we have been having has many of us Minnesotans wondering if spring really is here to stay. Most agree we probably still have at least one surprise snowstorm yet to come. If you put your snowblower away, you know, that will be the day it snows. Regardless, the beautiful, warmer days have had the bees very busy. We even broke a record for a high temperature last week when we reached 84 degrees F.   Since we are talking about breaking records, this is the first time we have had all of our hives survive through winter, and we couldn't be more happy about it.  We attribute the success, so far, to a lot of things we did differently last fall, including heavy end-of-season feeding and treating for va...

In my last post, we set our bees in their winter location and treated them.  There was a light dusting of snow and it was mid-November.  Now we are at that time in February when it's almost March and we can't remember how January went by so quickly. We have been hearing a lot of people say it's been a relatively mild winter so far. For the most part, that is true, but we did have subzero temperatures for three weeks straight. We have been occasionally pressing our ear to the hives to hear the hum inside, hoping the bees were making it through. This afternoon was beautiful. The sun was shining, the temperature was around 40 degrees F (4 degrees C), and it was the moment we could see, after all these months, that all three colonies have survived winter so far. Wonderful! Between this and all of the birds singing, my hope for spring came rushing back. Many bees left the hive today to relieve themselves and there were more dead bees outside the entrances. These are kind of awkw...

I realize that I think of updating this blog much more often than I do.  The beekeeping seasons are full of decisions, notes, and moments I would like to remember, but time just passes so quickly and the days are full.  This post has been something I have been putting off, though.   In late July, we lost Lee, who I called, "Mr. T," here on the blog. He was a friendly martial artist and retired correctional officer, a veteran, a naturalist and musician. He had been a friend to our family for over 30 years. He had a very short battle with cancer. Lee was the reason that we started beekeeping instead of letting it remain a daydream. Our bees have been kept on his land and he was one of their biggest cheerleaders. The last time I saw him, he brought us cold glasses of water while we were doing an inspection in the summer heat. I told him I wanted to update the blog again (since he was one of the handful of people who really read this), but that I wasn't sure I shoul...