bee hives

The race is on

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I am definitely not ready for haying, yet I now have to pivot and do it anyway. The neighbor who lets me hay their property called on Thursday and said it’s ready. I told the wife it is too early, by almost 3-4 weeks. I went over yesterday and yep, I have to come cut and bale hay. The grass is starting to go to head and needs to be cut! This is the earliest I have ever had to hay. That means I need to get the sickle bar mower on the tractor.

Normally, I put the sickle bar on the Kubota and rake and bale with the John Deere. Of course, on Thursday evening I had driven to the far end of the property and while I was there I mowed a path into the weeds on the backside of the creek. The only problem with this is I hit a huge rock! It broke off one of the brush hog blades about eight inches from the tip. I drove back home in the dark and Friday morning when I was walking over to the machine shed I noticed a line of hydraulic fluid going down the driveway. I may have a leak big enough to take the John Deere out of commission until it is fixed. I will have to look at it and see if I can find the leak.

Our flower bulbs need some water so I spent an hour and installed a new sprayer system for the flower bed. I turned it on and got a good soak. We have some bulbs that have not emerged yet and I think it is due to a lack of water. Annmarie wants me to get the big pots with chives moved back out to the front door porch entrance. I will need to get the dolly to make it reasonable, those are some big pots.

When we were out in the garden yesterday we picked four pieces of asparagus! We had missed out on about six pieces that were too big and already heading out. If I remember right we need to cut those off till later in the season so they produce more spears. We did not do that, I will need to go back out and do that.

I tried to get the pickup bed emptied. I had soil bags back there for the new asparagus planter. I was able to carry and empty about half of them before I just made a pile next to the truck. I ran out of time due to installing the water first. We needed the pickup to go pick up a new bee nuc so we would have two hives! They only do direct hive sales once a year and they don’t start loading until 1930. We got our bees around 2000 so most of ours were inside the hive. When we got home I moved the frames from their starter box into one of our boxes. I decided to “free ball” it and not wear any protective gear. Annmarie came out to hold the cell phone flashlight. I was down to the last two frames and got buzzed. I panicked and stepped back, Annmarie got stung on the arm! I settled down and finished the frame transfer and then we leaned the starter box lid next to our frame box. Our hope was the bees would just climb up into the hive. We decided to put the second box into the lavender so that the bees would not get mixed up with our others.

Honey bees are movers and shakers

Steve HardinLeave a comment

The honeybees are amazing. They are taking more time than I had anticipated on a regular basis. When the hive split we managed to catch the swarm and put them over in the orchard. Annmarie had just given them a short box to allow them some more space after we added in the rest of the large frames to the brood box. We were talking about the bees yesterday and I suggested we go out and look at the orchard bees. We walked out and she popped the roof off and you could see bees and comb in the center lid portion. This meant they had probably filled the entire short box with honey already!

So she suited up and went out to inspect the hive. The hardest part of beekeeping is in figuring out how to keep the smoker lit with smoke and not flames! So after fussing with it for a while we managed to get it going. We lifted the hive boxes up onto the stand. This helps keep the insects away from the hive. I helped but I told Annmarie I had to be in the back of the hive as I did not have a bee suit on. We are getting pretty comfortable but I am not that comfortable that I want to be on the entrance side bending down to lift the hive boxes! Maybe eventually we can do all the bee care with no protective gear but I am not sure that will ever happen. Annmarie has been reading and now just uses nitrile gloves so she can have better dexterity when working the bees. So far this works great, she says she can feel the bees bouncing off the gloves but she has not been stung through them yet. I have not reached this level of comfort yet. She scrapped the lid clean but the lower boxes had been welded together by the bees. Once she got them loose the inside frames were still stuck. She is going to have to take the entire thing apart frame by frame to get everything cleaned up and correct. We think the entire upper box is already full of honey. So this weekend she will get two supers on the bottom and then one honey box on top so we can get more honey. We get about 3/4 pint from each frame. The one thing we have found out that we did not anticipate is how much beeswax is being produced. We don’t have a ton of it yet but we are close to having a pound of it already. That doesn’t sound like much but it way more than I anticipated. She peeked at the second hive but that one has the young queen and she is not as proliferate as the old queen. She needs to be a better leader!

Annmarie is looking at making wax impregnated cloth wraps for sandwiches and bowl tops. They work pretty dang good, I was pleasantly surprised and have been using them for my sandwiches. The sandwich bread is just as fresh as if I had used plastic wrap and its a whole lot easier to eat the sandwich from the cloth wraps. I think we are going to figure out how to get a store setup on our blog site for the cloth wraps and maybe even the honey if we can collect enough. If the wax keeps piling up we may even sell that but honestly if we mail it there could be issues with it melting in the mail system. We may only be able to mail beeswax in the fall/winter/spring time.