Bees are fascinating. Honey is delicious. You understand the honey bee's importance to pollination.
But do you really want to become a beekeeper?
Over at Natural Home magazine, they've got an excerpt from a new book, titled Homemade Living: Keeping Bees with Ashley English. Part of Chapter 2 is available for you to read: "What to Consider: To Bee, or Not To Bee." On closer inspection of Ashley's work, she's got three other books out, on the topics of raising chickens, canning, and making homemade dairy products. If you check her out soon she's giving away a copy, so visit her blog and leave a comment.
If you have questions about beginning beekeeping, feel free to ask. I may not know the answer, but I can find out or point you in the right direction. Getting started in MS? There's still grant money through MBA if you want to start two hives. Beekeeping classes are coming up all over the state, courtesy of the Extension Service (scroll down on this page for both the grant info. and the beekeeping short courses).
We're having a ball, and encourage anyone to try it. "Less work than a dog, but more work than a cat," is how one person phrased it. Bees will never come when you call them, but I'll take honey over dog breath and cat hair any day!
On Saturday, we cleaned up our car port. A recent storm had blown hay, pine straw, potting soil, and leaves all over. Mark and I spent hours, washing equipment, inventorying, setting aside stuff to sell (seed spreader and moquito-killing machine), and generally getting organized.
A tidy stack of hive bodies.
Then we went to Sherwin-Williams to continue our quest to buy local, and decided on paint colors. With all white hives, there's a chance for drift, and changing up some colors and patterns is supposed to help the bees orient themselves to "home." Besides, it's fun and colorful! "We don't get many requests for bright yellow exterior paint," commented the salesman, so we had to go with an interior/exterior gloss.
Mark wanted colors that would reflect light so that the hives wouldn't get too hot in the summertime. Local beekeeper Art Potter is known for his patriotic red, white, and blue hives, so that was out. I decided to take inspiration from my fun winter project.
We chose yellow and blue. Then we ordered some stencils so we could decorate them with bees and blossoms.
Cheerful and Candid Blue.
On Sunday, we did a quick, top-super-only check of Hives 5 & 6 since they didn't get included last weekend. Loads of honey stores visible, so we left them alone. It was cloudy and windy, and thus too stressful for the bees to attempt deeper investigation. For the first time we tried using a tea towel as a hive drape, and it worked like a charm to send the bees down into the hive as opposed to out in the air.
Mark painted some hives on Monday, and when I got home on Tuesday, he was assembling frames. Last night I made him a poster to advertise that he'll catch local swarms and trap out unwanted bees. This morning before work he asked me how many hives we should plan to add, and moments ago when I called him on my lunch break, he was outside working on frames again.
It's official: hunting season is over, and bee season has begun in earnest.
At the blog Global Swarming Honeybees, this link to a slideshow featuring beautiful photography of bees of all types by Dr. Kevin Matteson, about whom you can learn here. If you click on "show info" you can see the types of bees identified -- their diversity is fascinating.
Tonight while Mark and Andrew watched a turkey hunting video, I created our account and first hive record on a free software program called Hive Tracks. I found out about it through Linda's blog. As one commenter noted, since it's a free service, you're at the mercy of their servers, business plans, and effort. However, the answer to that is to maintain a traditional notebook, save the yard reports each time you make updates to your records, and print reports periodically to add to your notebook as a summary.
As experienced beekeepers, the creators of Hive Tracks have all kinds of details and features that help you keep track of your queen (age, color if marked, type/breed), your hive components, and your harvest. I'm excited that I'll be able to rely on something besides notes I scrawl in the notebook while suited up and photographs. Now it's just a matter of taking the time to sit down and enter in all of the data!
Generally I think in very simple terms: pollinators = insects. While that's true, this slide show from National Geographic beautifully illustrates the wide variety of creatures who help spread pollen from bloom to bloom. Honey bees get a couple of photos, including one showing bees with the evil Varroa mites attached.
Tonight Mark talked to Harry Fulton, who recently retired from MSU-ES and is our local bee expert. He said:
the bees won't start eating the honey in earnest until they start making brood in earnest, which likely won't happen for another week or two at least.
no need to add hives until April -- they'll make room for the brood by eating up the honey stores we currently think are extra (but apparently aren't really)
order some "green-friendly," soon-to-be-approved treatment for Varroa mites
that he's not going to gather swarms this year as he's working having certified Russians, so he'll steer any swarm calls to Mark. He also suggested notifying local Extension offices and police departments, so I may do a small poster or something for him to take around.
now is the time to treat for American Foul Brood and to work on integrated pest management. We haven't had any problems so far, so I'm leery of doing a lot of chemical treatments. We'll have to do some more research and discussing.
I'm sure there was more to the conversation, but I was making sloppy joes so I didn't hear everything.
So for now we wait and watch. We have bee tea and one candy patty left so as long as we're paying attention, none of them should go without food.
While on a Saturday morning walk, we took a peek at the bees. The bees were coming and going from all of the hives, their pollen baskets loaded with bright yellow pollen. Henbit is starting to bloom along the roadsides, and we may have maples blooming, but the pollen surprised us. What we saw inside the hives -- masses of bees on the tops of the frames -- *seemed* to be the common signal that the bees were out of honey and couldn't climb any higher in their search. In the hives where we'd put a pollen patty, they were covering the supplemental food source. Of special concern was Hive 1, our strongest hive thus far. If they didn't have any food, we'd lose our top hive to starvation.
We rushed back to the house. I started cooking up bee tea, Mark stared loading the 4-wheeler with feeders and related equipment, and we grabbed all of the gear we have so our weekend guests, Michael and Michele Rainey, could join in the fun.
Since the weather was so incredibly beautiful (in the mid 70s!), we decided to do full inspections so we could see if we had brood, what the remaining honey and pollen stores were, and to make sure we hadn't gotten any pests.
Hive 4 had eaten one entire candy patty, and the warm weather had turned the second one to a gooey mess. Surprisingly, they had honey and pollen, though few frames had full amounts of drawn comb. The bees were few in number, but there was some capped brood, and they weren't aggressive.
Hives 2 & 3, started from the nucs we'd bought, had medium populations. We saw the queen in both, little to no brood yet (though we didn't inspect every frame), and some full frames of honey, along with pollen stores.Michael and Michele took turns wearing Mark's extra shirt, veil, and gloves so they could see what was going on. They couldn't believe how heavy one frame of honey was.
Then we got to Hive 1. Mark was working without gloves, and to this point had no problem. Of course, as I reminded him, Hive 1 is our most aggressive colony, and he had pulled a medium super full of honey, plus about 2 frames on the deep brood box before they started stinging his hands. They appear to have loads of honey, and may be "honey bound" meaning they don't have room to reproduce. Mark may put a deep super underneath the current set in hopes that they'll expand into the space, avoid swarming, and have room for the queen to lay eggs. We closed up Hive 1 without inspecting too much, as there was a lot of brace comb sealing the frames together, and Mark's hands were under attack.
We didn't have a camera to take any photos, so here is a photo from a beekeeper in Scotland, who blogs at Border Bees Diary. This is what our bees looked like.
The bee tea is in the refrigerator, just in case we need to feed in the next week or two.
