Thanksgiving

Saturday our whole family went to the Worcester County Beekeeper Association's Thanksgiving Banquet. This was downright horrible year for most of us beekeepers and for most everyone in agriculture. Nevertheless, we were challenged to find something to be thankful for. Here's my list...

1. My bees! - They are so beautiful and connect to my soul in ways that few others have. I am going into the winter in such a better place than last year. Even though I had a small honey and wax harvest, the bees are plentiful.
2. Being a beekeeper - I am so grateful for the opportunity to learn more and in some way help these beautiful girls.
3. Other beekeepers - I am ever so lucky to have the mentoring and fellowship of the wonderful beekeepers in this area. I have learned so much and feel supported in this adventure.
4. My kids - When faced with the challenge of finding something to be grateful for, both my kiddos immediately came up with a long list! They were grateful for the garden full of produce. They saw the glass as half full - what a beautiful way to look at the year.
5. My sweetheart - It was for him that I started keeping bees, but he's really risen to the challenge and adventure of it all. He created a screened bottom board out of his stash of wood in the garage to bring something to the Thanksgiving raffle. He does the same for me - building what I need for the bees.

So what are you thankful for...

Mouse Guards

I love reading all my friend's blogs about Halloween and potty training. I am happy to have a diverse group of friends because that is so not my life anymore. While many others were preparing for parties and buying value sized boxes of diapers, I was putting on mouse guards.

My daughter, nearly 6, checked out the hives this weekend for the first time. Unfortunately, she's still too small to see over the top of the boxes very easily as they are set up now, but she was so calm and moved so gracefully. I can see her keeping her own hive in a couple of years.

Naturally she has a fondness for Pink's hive and here's a picture of Pink's girls emerging from their inner cover opening. This is inside a box where I put honey for them to eat now. I am hoping that all three hives take some honey from me (that I robbed from them this summer when they were honey bound!) and put it up for the winter.

I also put mouse guards on two of the hives. These are metal gates that fit across the front of the hive that, as you guessed, keep out mice. Mice LOVE to overwinter in a hive where it is nice a warm and they can make a nest with the wooden frames and wax.

I have another guard on the way from one of my favorite bee equipment companies, Brushy Mountain.

So while my kids remain potty trained and we had no behavior problems at our big harvest dinner, I was so happy for our milestone: how joyous my daughter was to see the bees close up.

Stay of Execution

I asked our bee inspector Ken Warchol to come visit my hives to help me get rid of Pink because I was planning on combining Pink and Sun's hives for the winter. I am SO glad I asked him to come over.

He said that Pink's have was the stronger of the two hives and that he thought all three hives were good and strong! Yay! And being the great teacher that he is, he explained to me how to tell - essentially if on a cool day the bees are still in the top box across all the frames, there are plenty of bees.

On the other hand, and isn't there always one, all three hives need more honey. I am trying to feed them honey but it might be too chilly for then to take a bunch of honey. With the extra cold weather these days I am going to offer them sugar water as well and then treat them in the spring for the intestinal parasites bees get.

On his way out, Ken had one of Pink's girls on his hat. She'd gotten a bit chilly, so I took her home.

Bee Meeting

Last Saturday I spent the whole day talking bees. The local beekeepers club was able to get two fabulous smart scientists to discuss their research.

Dr. Marla Spivak is well know for her work in to Minnesota Hygienic bees. Getting her to come to our meeting was no small feat. Hygienic bees are not girls who take more showers - they actually were selectively breed to keep the hive cleaner and groom each other. Mites that attach to larvae in the hive give these bees some small signal that gets them to remove the larvae with heavy mite loads. This does kill the larvae but also the mites. These bees also groom each other more and remove the mites from adult bees. Both of these behaviors can help to reduce the amount of medications that beekeepers use to keep bees alive.

She's moving out of this work and spoke at length about her new passion: Propolis. Wild bees line their nest cavitiesn with it and bees in boxes use it like caulking. Propolis has amazing properties including being an antibacterial, anti viral and anti fungus. Now this part is a bit complicated but essentially coating your house with propolys is like sealing it in a protective bubble that keeps nasty microbes on the outside. This allows the bees individual immune systems to relax a bit. Now how do I paint my house with it!

The second researcher is fairly local - Dr. Heather Mattila from Wellsley. Honeybees, unlike most other social insects, mate with many drones. And I am talking A LOT! Some species of honeybee queens make -on average - with more than 60 drones. Yep - SIXTY. My own girls tend to be a bit more modest mating with between 6 and 20 drones. She was studying the question is more better?

Well, more is ... more - in human terms the sluttier the better. The more drones a queen mates with the better for the colony. The bees are more active and the queen lays more babies. I am thinking, from the way she described the difference between a queen mated with one drone and a queen mated with many drones that both Red and Pink were not well mated queens.

In her second talk, Dr. Mattila talked about life in a swarm. This was soo cool. She and her students studied the waggle dances of new home-foragers. It was just amazing to see how each new space was "talked" about by the forager to the swarm, then how the swarm carried on the conversation about different potential new homes. It looked just like a social networking site on the Internet!

So what did I take away from this meeting:
1. I need to collect propolis as a hive product and now have the knowledge to do so - now I need to learn more about marketing and using it
2. Pink is not as well mated as Sun and should be the queen who overwinters
3. I want to more scientifically monitor my mite levels so I can better track which medications are needed and when to most effectively apply them

Sweet day

Today I went apple picking with a bunch of my friends. I love having friends of all ages and still being included by my friends who have kids at home. We did find the amazing Spencer apple that I lust after every year. This year my expectations are low and my hopes high for some good treats. The apples were challenging to find and many were damaged.

And on a bee-note - many of the apples were not fully pollinated. When an apple gets fully pollinated it will be round and full. A partial pollination will result in an apple that is flat on one or more sides. Although we like to think of ourselves as outside of nature, we never can be. The weather affects the bees and that affects the food we eat. And here in New England apples are among a small handful of foods we identify ourselves with.

I pulled the last frames of people honey from Joy's hive today and it was a pretty sad experience. There were - at best - three full frames of honey. So for the year that brings us near 10 frames, just about half what we got last year.

On a happy note, the bees are all medicated. MEDICATED - you ask!? Yes, I do medicate the bees with formic acid - a soft and gentle method to help them get rid of the pesky mites that attack the bee's bodies and the tracheal mites that attach to their throats choking them. We need 21 days of 50' weather for Joy's hive to be fully medicated. (Pink and Sum are 10 days into their 21.)

As soon as I spin down the people honey, I will take out all the near-honey and nectar that the bees worked so hard on. This I will feed back to them. This time of year we often experience a dearth - a lack of nectar. The extra food - near-honey and some bee honey - will be put up for the winter.

Other sweet fall treats

My daughter and I picked apples at a local orchard earlier this month. The apples, Paula Reds, were rapidly starting to fade. I had high hopes of their juiciness with the excessive rain we've had all year - alas my hopes were dashed. These apples were very tasty but not extra juicy.

I dried a handful of apples, made a bit of applesauce, but decided to make apple pie filling with the majority of them. This was my first time making apple pie filling to can and it worked pretty well. Next time I need to remember to pick the BIG apples so there is less peeling!

There are still a few weeks to go before my very favorite cooking apple is ripe: Spencer. Towns in this area all had apple cultivars names for them. Few still exist and the Spencer is a beauty. The apples are large, red globes with a perfect balance of crispness, sweetness and tongue-tingling tartness. They make apple pies good enough to write home about.

Spencer apples are ripe in about 3 weeks. Yum

Honey Clean-up

I thought I'd enlist some help with the post-extraction clean up. Quite a few friends showed up. It took about 20 minutes and there was honey everywhere.