The summer has been quite busy and I haven't had too much quality time with my girls. I love this time of year and could literally spend hours watching the girls coming and going from the hive entrance, noting all the colors on their pollen baskets.
I was out this week with Lorraine just to check on honey production. I've noticed that there is a definite difference with boy beekeeping and girl beekeeping. When the girls are out checking the hives it's, "May I have the hive tool please? Thank you?" or "Could you puff a little smoke on my hand? Awesome, thank you."
With boys involved at the hive...it's different. It's more of "We need smoke here, now!" or "You're standing in the worst possible place." Not that we don't appreciate the boys at the hive, we love the boys, they are an important part of our beekeeping operating, but it's fun to note the dynamics.
The bees are in serious honey gathering mode. The Bickman hive (the award winning hive) has an almost full honey super and is about halfway through filling a comb honey super.
As we were checking the supers, Bickman had made some cells between the two supers and they were ripped apart when we moved them. All the girls came in right away to clean the mess.
Word soon spread to the hive that more tongues were needed and many workers came up to eat the spilled honey--those pheromone work great for mass communication--gotta love it. One super was almost full, the other was halfway and I wasn't sure when we'd be back, but we thought we would add a third just for the heck of it. We walked back to the house to grab a super and when we came back (which couldn't have been more than 15 minutes)...
They had licked the spilled honey dry! I think this is one of the many parts of beekeeping that is so enjoyable. You read about what bees are capable of, but as a beekeeper, you get the chance to actually witness this miraculous insect. I love beekeeping.
Here is a little video of the bees licking the honey. As usual, if you go to the actual YouTube page, you can click on "watch in high quality" button so the bees in full beauty:
Lorraine and I had to put the hives back together and with all the massive honey gathering and our short statures, it's a tad tricky (did miss the boys' help with that today. Lorraine and I struggled to put the hive back and when finished, I had a slight problem:
My beesuit got caught in the hive and mashed with some sticky propolis for good measure. It took some pulling and wedging, but I finally managed to get free.
So, we thought we would try a propolis trap for our beehives. Propolis is a sticky, resinous substance that bees collect from trees, I think sap. They use it as a sealant for holes in the hive, or they cover anything they don't like from stray leaves to dead mice. Humans like propolis because there claims of medicinal properties. I don't know about that, but I like the texture of a little propolis in the hive. We have a couple of propolis traps, so we thought we'd give them a try on a couple of hives. True to beekeeping equipment, the trap came with no instructions at first the bees ignored it until a blog reader told me that I need to keep the roof ajar. The bees see light coming in seal off the trap to block the light.
So, we gave it a try on the MimiKo and Bickman hives. We left the roof ajar and set the propolis trap on top of the inner cover.
There's a little hole in the inner cover that the bees can use to access the roof. Bless the bees hearts, they only filled the propolis right where the hole was on the inner cover--doing the least amount of work necessary and keeping the hive efficiently dark.
There was one tiny disturbing thing around the trap in the MimiKo Hive--ants. Large ants. They were between the inner cover and the roof and not into the rest of the hive. There are some dead bees on the ceiling and the ants were taking those apart, but I hope they don't decided to make themselves too welcome. I did some checking on google and found this from Go Beekeeping:
"Ants are a nuisance in the bee hive. They often build nest under the top cover and above the inner cover where the bees don't bother them. They seem to cause very little damage to the bees except be a curse to the beekeeper who wants to control them.
Treatment: Any chemical used to destroy ants will also kill bees. One could set the bee hive on a stand supported by four legs. Each leg would fit into a can filled with oil preventing ants from climbing up the side of the hive. Don't spend too much time worrying about them."
We looked down inside and the MimiKo bees were pretty chill. One ant came down and even ran into a couple of bees but there were no severe altercations. As long as the ants don't mess with the insides I won't stress too much, but I don't like that riff raff hanging out with my girls.
I was talking with Mr. Neil the other day about bee blogging. Periodically, I get emails from people asking "Hey, it's been awhile since you blogged bees, can we get another post please?" Or something to that effect. But since I've started working on the bee book in earnest, I've lost the desire to blog the bees. He could relate. The book is not a reprinting of the blog, some of the same stories will be there, but with more and different details and you just can't write a book the same way you write a blog--hyperlinking just does not translate.
I did have a minor bit of panic in the MimiKo hive recently. When we opened the roof, we found webbing in the corner. I worried that it may be wax moths. Wax moths lay eggs in gaps in your hive and when the larvae hatches, they crawl into your comb and eat the wax, making webs all over the place. Incidentally, if you have been purchasing the wax worms this summer for birds during the mealworm shortage--that's the same thing. Those buggers can really mess up a hive. However, if you have a strong, healthy colony, they can stop the moth larvae before they get too bad. I looked closely at the webbing and then suddenly realized that the small dots I thought was frass left from the larvae--were moving...with eight legs. These were baby spiders. Something else I don't care to have in the hive. I grabbed my handy dandy hive tool and evicted the spiders. I hated to do it, I respect what spiders do in the food chain, but I'd rather they didn't do it in the beehives.
So, we interrupt the shorebirding I was about to blog about to do a beekeeping update. I think when I last wrote about our humble beekeeping operation, we had combined the queenless Olga hive with the strong Kitty hive using the newspaper method. We took the remaining brood box with bees from Olga and placed it in Kitty, separating the box with a thin layer of newspaper. The bees would chew through the newspaper, giving the Olga bees a chance to absorb the pheromones of Queen Kitty and not start any fights.
When we check on them a week later, the newspaper on the bottom was completely eaten away.
They were still working their way through the top, but all seems to be going well and we are now a three hive operation. Not bad for our second year, not bad at all.
Meanwhile, the Bickman Bees have really set the tone for this summer--their honey won the blue ribbon at the county fair! It started as a wacky idea, I told Mr. Neil, Lorraine, and Non Birding Bill that we should enter our honey in the local fair. Having scoped out the rules and figuring we could afford the fifty cent entry fee, we gave it a go. I must say, Lorraine did the bulk of the work (apart from the bees): she extracted the honey and dealt with the slumgum, read up on what makes for an award winning entry, and walked it to the fair.
I was going to try and go out, but I was too swamped after my tv segment today--I still have not unpacked from last week! I got a phone call this afternoon Mr. Neil and Lorraine reported that the honey from our bees got the blue ribbon. Above is Lorraine posing with the entries.
It's beautiful too--a very pale color. I've had a couple of bites of feral comb from the hive, but have not tasted the official entry. Apparently, it tastes much different than Olga's honey last year.
I can't believe the overwhelming sense of pride I have in my hard workin' girls right now. This has been a pretty good year--I've got steady work that I enjoy, my second book came out, I've traveled to some fabulous places, but...I think seeing our bees take the blue ribbon has to top it. Not only because beekeeping is one of the most awesome things a person can do in life (aside from birding and living with a pet rabbit) but it's been a team effort with my husband and two really good friends.
...and now I have the A-Team Theme running through my head. Great.
Well, there have been some changes in the beekeeping operation. But first, let's start with the fun.
Can I say how grateful I am for the sweet natured temperament of the MimiKo bees? They are just a joy to visit and are still so friendly and easy going...which as you will read later, is much needed this summer. I love it when I open the lid of a hive and all is calm and a few bees that are at the top of the frames just kind of poke their heads up to see what is going on. They just hang there as if to ask, "Hey, how's it going? Did you see the dance about that aster patch on the south side of the fallow field--that's some good nectar." They're so fuzzy up close, you almost want to pet them.
My buddy Jody the Librarian came out with me for some of the hive inspections and I had her do some hand feeding. That is the cool thing to do this summer: come out to the hives and feed bees bare handed. Once you've had bee tongue on your finger, you never go back to life as it was before.
Above is a Bickman hive frame with some out of control comb construction. In a beehive, you have deep brood boxes with longer frames that bees put their brood and food stores. Then there are smaller boxes called honey supers that bees building excess honey in and you get to eat. We've been having a tough time convincing some of the bees to get out of their brood boxes and go build up inside the honey supers. So, I put a smaller honey super frame inside a deep brood box of the Bickman hive. The plan was to have her start to draw out comb on the frame and then I would put it back up in the honey super and encourage the girls to build up there. I left the frame in just a little to long and the bottom of the frame was covered in soon to be drone cells. I scraped those off and put the frame back in the honey super...honey should be packed in there by the end of this month. Whoot.
I will say this, the Bickman hive has low tolerance for shenanigans. While scraping off the drones cells, a worker tried to sting my glove. I didn't feel it, but I saw her stuck on the finger tip. I had Jody smoke my glove. When a worker bee stings you, she releases a pheromone that tells her sisters, "Hey! Something bad, right here, come sting too!" And soon more bees arrive. Sometimes it's instantaneous. You'll see the one sting you and three seconds later, five bees fly to the spot. If you use your smoker and puff it over the sting, that will mask the pheromone and prevent more bees from coming to join in the stinging fun. Jody smoked my glove, but this one bee pictured above was furiously trying to find the spot to sting. She kept angrily buzzing the glove, but couldn't find the exact spot to sting. Her stinger kept popping in and out of her body, but my camera was not fast enough to catch it.
Jody and I also checked the Kitty and Olga hives. Kitty is still going strong. Above is a frame with some early drawn out comb. Kitty is strong. We looked in on Olga, neither of the new queens had hatched yet. Damn. They should have hatched by now and it was clear that they just weren't going to. Olga was dying. The workers were in a slow death. What could I do? Well, there's the dump method where you take a brood box and dump in front of other hives and hope for the best that some of the workers will make it past the guard bees of other hives and start a new life there. We opted for the news paper method. I went back to consult an under the weather Mr. Neil. He agreed, it was time to combine the weak hive with a strong hive. I waited until later in the afternoon when more foragers would be back and could take Non Birding Bill with me.
NBB opened up Olga. She was quiet, not the robust busting of activity that she had been in the past. Even though we had two brood boxes on Olga, half the frames in each box were empty, so we took frames full of bees and combined them into one brood box.
We then went over to the Kitty hive, opened the roof and ceiling, placed down a layer of newspaper and set the Olga box on that. Since some Kitty bees were still coming back from foraging and using the top of the hive, we put another piece of newspaper on top of the Olga box, and then put Kitty's honey supers on top. The bees will chew through the newspaper in the next 24 hours and hopefully by that time, the workers will have absorbed the new queen's pheromone and acclimate to the hive. Mr. Neil wisely pointed out that pointed Kitty was simply Olga's daughter hive anyway (we divided Olga this spring to create the Kitty hive), so Olga was transforming back to herself..
I went back to where Olga had been. We missed some bees. Foragers were still coming back and landing on the bottom board of where their hive had been. I looked at the frame with the two queen cells that didn't hatch. Did I do this too soon? Was there any chance that the queens might hatch really late. I needed to open them to know...but what would I find. I couldn't open them. NBB took the frame and offered to open the queen cells and tell me. I was a coward and agreed. He said that the larvae in both cells was shriveled and dried up. Something had gone wrong.
I watched former Olga foragers landing on the board and furiously running around. Guilt knotted up in my stomach. A lump formed in my throat. The sound was awful and full of panic:
It was early evening, it was cool, and it would be dark soon. Where would these bees go?
I took all the frames out of a brood box but set it up with an entrance and roof so they would have someplace to hang out in at night, some sort of shelter. Maybe some of them would fly over to the Kitty hive and the guards would let them through. Otherwise, what else would they do? NBB had to drive the vehicle with the remains of the Olga hive back to the house, I opted to walk. I felt terrible. As took the path, I saw a honey bee foraging on some clover. I wondered to myself if it was an Olga bee, and tears filled my eyes, she's gathering pollen and nectar only to head back to hive that no long exists. I thought back to all the lessons in beekeeping the Olga hive had taught me: how I freaked out big time because she was my first time putting new bees in; she gave my only sting thus far, we got comb honey from her last year, we listened to her in winter.
And now she is gone. She's very much a part of the Kitty hive and perhaps it's appropriate that the two hives we started with last year are combined into one hive this year. I didn't think I would feel this bad. I tearily met up with NBB and he patted my back and agreed that he too felt bad, but really at the end of the day, they are just insects. I tried to listen, but found that my typical anti anthropomorphic resolve was failing. These are just bees, they only live for like 21 days anyway.
So, days when you make the decision to end a hive, it's good to have a friendly hand feeding hive as a back up.
No, I'm not too attached to my bees. I can quit beekeeping at any time. Really, I can. It's not a habit. So what if I broke down in my hair stylist's chair yesterday as I related the story? I'm not in too deep, really. I can totally handle this.
Actually, I've had a few days to chew on this since it happened, so I am over the loss of the Olga hive and can chuckle at myself for being so wrapped up in my bees (and looking at the calendar, I'm sure hormones had something to do with it too). Meanwhile, there have been other happy and cool things related to beekeeping on:
MimiKo (hive namesake) sent me a kickin' shirt for my birthday--it's an Eddie Izzard shirt and much like his routine, I'm a beekeeper who is happy to be covered in bees. And, unlike a majority of bird shirts out there, this is actually designed for a woman's body and looks cute--bird manufacturers, please take note--you don't have to sell only men's sizes or the unisex sizes.
And another artist has been inspired by our bees (some may remember the Lisa Snellings art). Well, this really cool photographer named Kimberly Butler made a series of photos based on our beekeeping adventures--that's one above them. She gave us a signed copy. I was speechless when she showed it to us, it was so weird and reminded me of calm, happy bees poking their heads over frames to see what you are doing. So, in many ways, old hives do live on in really weird and wonderful ways.
Do you ever have days where you feel like no one can make a mistake as big as you can, or quite so publicly, and taking several people down with you in the process? That you are perhaps the antithesis of tact? That perhaps the place for you to reside for the next month or so would be under a rock? I was having that kind of day earlier this week.
Then I got a somewhat panicked call from Lorraine. She said that there were several bees in the garage and they were going for the bee equipment and hive boxes. Could this be a swarm? If it was a swarm, was it from one of our hives or was it from a neighbor or even a passing truck? Was is something else? Did Lorraine have a camera?
Lorraine didn't have a camera to document this and she didn't see a large clump of bees that could mean a swarm but assured me a large quantity of bees was in the garage. I decided to head out regardless, I needed the company, someone needed to get photos, and even if it wasn't a swarm, something blogable was happening.
By the time I arrived, the amount of bees had diminished but it was still enough to make me want to put on a bee suit. Many bees were crowded on the windows and surrounding some old frames, but there was no telltale clump that would mean a swarm.
What we had were robber bees. In the above photo, are the old frames from the Kitty Hive that died out this winter--they were covered in bees. Lorraine had left the garage door open and a worker bee found them, went back to a hive, did a little dance that said to other workers, "Holy crap, there's a trashed hive with some frames with honey! We don't even have to gather nectar and convert it to honey, we can just take the honey! Watch me dance!"
And soon several thousand bees followed suit to the garage. We stood outside the garage to watch where they were coming from because we have the Olga and Kitty Hive in one area and Bickman and MimiKo in another area. The traffic flow appeared to head towards Kitty and Olga and my guess is that these are Kitty bees. Lorraine and I decided to head out to do some late afternoon bee inspections. Not the best idea, most of your foragers are back at the hive at that time and they are most likely to sting you, however, we were just going to check the tops of the hives and not dig too deep.
We did dig deep into the queenless Olga hive to check her progress. We found queen cells on June 22 and we were checking the hive on July 8. The queen should emerge in 15 - 17 days after being laid. Hopefully, a queen will emerge by this weekend, kill off the other queen cell, go on a nuptial flight and replenish this hive. Maybe this queen cell was emerging on Tuesday? Note the little notch in the capping at the top? Fingers crossed for this queenless hive.
Kitty seemed well and contented. She's a little behind in production compared to the MimiKo and Bickman hives, but seems well on her way to filling the hive in time for winter.
The MimiKo hive was super calm for so late in the afternoon. We didn't use the smoker on her. Everyone was mellow while we checked honey supers that had been placed on top recently. I told Lorraine that this would be the perfect time to hand feed the bees.
So we took off our gloves and dabbed a tiny bit of honey on our hands and tried to find a taker for our sweet finger tips. Low and behold, we found a taker. Above is Lorraine, without a glove, hand feeding a honeybee. Here is a close up:
The little bee tongue reached right out for her sweet fingers. This was a truly amazing moment if you knew Lorraine before we stared the whole beekeeping operation--she was the most opposed to the idea from the beginning, I seem to recall her shouting several times "Bees are NOT in my job description!" And now she not only goes out to the hives and does maintenance, she's out at the hive during the busiest time, with minimal smoke, bare-handedly feeding worker bees. A testament to how chill the MimiKo bees are and how much Lorraine has mellowed out in regards to beekeeping.
We checked the Bickman hive, she's sorta friendly but not nearly as laid back as the MimiKo hive. Mr. Neil had called while I was in Utah and said that he put a honey super on her and I wasn't sure she was ready, but looking at her third brood box, she was totally full and ready--he was right to add the honey super. Above is a photo inside our Ross Round Comb Honey Super and none of the bees had started drawing out comb. There looked to be a couple of half hearted attempts, but Lorraine and I decided to take a frame from the super and replace it with a honey frame in the top brood box. We did this last year with Olga. Once the bees draw out honey on the frame, we put back in the honey super and they go up and continue the work. Since all of Bickman's frames were full, Lorraine and I had to take back a frame of honey and got to sample and eat it--now we were the robber bees! Truly, there is nothing in the world like taking a bite of honey comb fresh from the hive, it's warm, chewy and sweet.
We also switched out a frame with MimiKo and put in a honey super frame in Kitty so we can put those up in the honey supers. I'm not sure about Kitty, but I'm confident that we will get honey from MimiKo and Bickman by the end of the summer.
Lorraine and I went out to dinner and I was feeling better--working with bees eased the burn of my unfortunate mistake I had been brooding about for the last twenty-four hours. I've been traveling so much this summer that I have not been out at the hives nearly as much as last summer. Unless you have to do something big like search a colony for a failing queen, beekeeping can be a very soothing hobby. I periodically get emails from people contemplating beekeeping and they are not sure. I say that if you have ever remotely contemplated it--do it. Yes, there's work, but it's the most amazing thing.
Well, after all the heartbreak of the failed requeening of Olga, we decided to give her some eggs and see if she will queen herself. We checked her on Sunday and found 2 queen cells--those are the two yellow things pointing down on the comb. When workers sense the need for a queen, they will pick a fertilized egg and feed it nothing but royal jelly, place it in a larger cell to grow (workers only get royal jelly for three days, then switch to regular food). One of these queens should hatch sometime next week, kill off the other queen cell, go on a mating flight and hopefully will find a drone congregation area consisting of drones from the MimiKo and Bickman hives, mate and kill about 12 - 15 of them, come back and commence to layin' some eggs for this troubled colony...hopefully the queen will do this without being eaten by a great-crested flycatcher or swallow. I have no idea if this will work, but if there's one thing that beekeeping is teaching me, it's that the more I mess with the hives, the more likely they are to fail, so I'm gonna let the bees do their thing. If she's too weak going into the winter, we may combine her with Kitty.
Sunday night, a friend named Sabrina stopped by for an oh so tasty lamb dinner prepared by Mr. Neil. Afterwards she asked if I would mind showing her the hives. Would I mind? I love showing off the girls! I didn't really want to start up the smoker again because it takes so long to get going and asked Sabrina, "How much do you want to see, do you want to just walk by them or do you want to see the inside?"
"You mean I could actually look inside the hive?!?" Sabrina asked excitedly.
Non Birding Bill and I decided to take her to the more docile MimiKo and Bickman hives. They are still so new, so young, so friendly. Sabrina has an allergy to bee stings, so we made sure that her bee suit was fully secure and took her out. Both hives were INCREDIBLY docile, considering we were out there in the evening when all the foragers are back and we had no smoker. Some of the bees were even lapping up spilled honey off of our gloves. Their buzzing was so soft, so content. I really, really love beekeeping. I love birding, but I never really knew how much bees were going to take over my life and how much I would just fall in love with our fuzzy little stinging insects.
The best part of the day, was that both MimiKo and Bickman are in overdrive producing honey and comb. There's a bit of feral building going on that we need to scrape it away to make inspections easier. We all got to have our first bite of honey comb straight from the hive to your tongue. Honestly, there is nothing quite like soft, chewy comb, warmed from the summer sun in the hive. You bite into it and get these little bursts of sweetness of all the flowers within two miles having a party in your mouth. The wax is soft, similar to a taffy consistency. It's just the best. The honey tastes a bit different from Bickman and MimiKo which kind of makes sense, they are in a different area than Olga and Kitty--those have a more clover, fruit blossom flavor. MimiKo and Bickman still have a wild sweetness, but not the same delicacy. It's a bit more woodsy, perhaps because there's so much giant hemlock nearby?
Anyway, it was on this evening inspection that we found that weird jumping spider. It really did look like some strange demon man. See:
Can't you just see him shaking his tiny little fist in anger? I'm not too worried about a spider on the hive. Should it be foolish enough to try and go inside, the bees will ball it in short order.
My friends, I'm sad to report that the outlook of the Olga hive is not good. Mr. Neil, Non Birding Bill and I headed out to do a quick bee inspection...Olga has no eggs, no brood, nothing. And the overall buzzing sound is just sad--dissonant. The new queen didn't take. We're not sure what happened. We purchased a new queen to replace the one missing in action, and Lorraine made sure to release her and it didn't work. There could be several reasons: was the new queen not fertile (doubtful) or did she get released and not all the bees in the hive accepted her and at some point killed her? Is there democratic movement going on and the workers have decided to ditch the monarchy system?
We decided to make one last ditch effort by putting in a frame with some eggs from the Kitty hive to see of the Olga bees will grow a queen, but that's going to take another 16 days and then if they get that far, she has to go on a "maiden voyage" and will she find drones to mate with? Will she get eaten by a great-crested flycatcher or purple martin? It's just time to let go and let bee--see if they can sort it out themselves, we've done all we can.
After we checked Olga, I began to understand why so many people I meet and find out that I keep bees say, "Oh yeah, I did that once." Last summer was so fun, something new to discover every week, bees mostly following the books and doing some cool things on their own. I was feeling down and getting irritated with my junior beekeepers. When NBB and Mr. Neil went to retrieve a frame of eggs from Kitty for the Olga hive, Mr. Neil dutifully came over with a frame full of eggs...and Kitty bees. "NO!" I shouted. "We can't have bees, and the queen could be on there, you can't put Kitty workers in with Olga workers! The Kitty Queen could be on there!"
NBB insisted that they both had checked for the queen and would brush the Kitty bees back into their hives. I was feeling the pressure and felt bad for snapping at them. Two hives not doing super great. The unhappy buzzing of Olga just made me question the whole beekeeping operation. Sure, even if Olga dies, we'll still get her honey, but what went wrong? Was it something we could have prevented? Is this spot too shady for the bees? We had to move Olga over a little bit this spring, did we move her too close to a tree trunk? Also, like last summer, I found that we were trying all sorts of things to try and save her and it seems to be postponing the inevitable.
Then we left the Kitty and Olga hives and went over to the new Bickman and MimiKo hives and the world shifted. These were happy, healthy hives! And MimiKo was getting creative with her comb. Mr. Neil and NBB took off the top brood box and we found this:
They drew out some funky comb! Go MimiKo. One side had eggs and the other side did not, so we decided to smoosh it onto another frame without eggs. The buzzing at these hives was much happier, much more in harmony. Despite the fact that a couple of weeks earlier when I stole a frame of brood from this hive and angered them, they were still pretty cool with us and we barely needed the smoker.
The Bickman hive was just as happy and friendly. Here is the sound of a happy Bickman bee with full pollen baskets waiting for another worker to help her unload. Watch her little butt bouncing in expectancy:
Hear that happy buzzing in the background?
Another worker approached and started to get the pollen. Check out the bee with the pollen baskets. Notice anything strange in that photo? It looks like she has not wings. I think she was moving them so quickly that my camera couldn't pick them up at that setting. The happy buzzing sounds, the friendly bees, the industrious drawing out of comb, the healthy harmonious sounds--now I remembered why I love beekeeping. I looked at NBB and Mr. Neil and was overcome with joy. Though Olga might be failing, Kitty isn't doing so bad and MimiKo and Bickman are going like gang busters. The beekeeping life is good.
Mr. Neil and I have made the leap from newbie to true beekeepers. The one thing that is a constant among all beekeepers is disagreement. You ask 5 beekeepers a question, you'll get 5 different answers, all thought out and with reasons (good or bad) for the madness. I learned from the Beekeeping Short Course that in northern climates like Minnesota, you should do a three deep brood box systems so your bees will overwinter. The bottom two boxes have brood and honey, the top is all honey. Mr. Neil has been reading online about a two deep brood box system that some people in Wisconsin have tried and think that it helps to keep your bees clustered and warm. We were "discussing this" and in the middle we suddenly stopped and realized--"Hey, we sound like beekeepers! We're arguing over method! Sweet!"
Now I think we can truly call ourselves beekeepers and not "I'm a new beekeeper."
I was out this week with Lorraine just to check on honey production. I've noticed that there is a definite difference with boy beekeeping and girl beekeeping. When the girls are out checking the hives it's, "May I have the hive tool please? Thank you?" or "Could you puff a little smoke on my hand? Awesome, thank you."
The bees are in serious honey gathering mode. The Bickman hive (the award winning hive) has an almost full honey super and is about halfway through filling a comb honey super.
As we were checking the supers, Bickman had made some cells between the two supers and they were ripped apart when we moved them. All the girls came in right away to clean the mess.
Word soon spread to the hive that more tongues were needed and many workers came up to eat the spilled honey--those pheromone work great for mass communication--gotta love it. One super was almost full, the other was halfway and I wasn't sure when we'd be back, but we thought we would add a third just for the heck of it. We walked back to the house to grab a super and when we came back (which couldn't have been more than 15 minutes)...
They had licked the spilled honey dry! I think this is one of the many parts of beekeeping that is so enjoyable. You read about what bees are capable of, but as a beekeeper, you get the chance to actually witness this miraculous insect. I love beekeeping.
My beesuit got caught in the hive and mashed with some sticky propolis for good measure. It took some pulling and wedging, but I finally managed to get free.
