Bees on Vacation

This past summer, like every summer for past decade plus, we go to Maine for a vacation. My father in law loans us his cabin in the woods for two weeks and we head off grid. It is an amazing experience.

Over the years I've kayaked the entire lake and a portion of the rivers it is connected to - both coming in and going out. For a few years in one corner of the pond, there were honeybees working the flowers. I didn't see them last year or this year.

But I did see bees! I saw two kinds of bumble bee, red bees, and mason bees.Balancing a camera and a kayak in moving water is a bit much for me so I got a lot of blurry pictures except for this one.

One the way home, we often visit Swan Honey in Albion Maine. I love how much it has grown and changed over the years. They are such wonderful people. They have over 9,000 hives with a bunch living in the field across from their shop. They paint their hives what ever color is on hand. 

Ask A Beekeeper: Mountain Laurel

I get lots of honey related question as a beekeeper and this question was asked by a fellow beekeeper C!

Does Mountain Laurel make honey toxic?

The simple answer is yes it does, but there are two reasons not to worry about it.

First, bees don't seem to like Mountain Laurel much and will use other nectar sources first. If it is a really dry year, they may seek out the Mountain Laurel but  in most years it accounts for a tiny fraction of a portion of the nectar used to make a given hive's honey.  For most folks you have to consume a vast amount of the honey to get sick.

Second, the honey that bees make from Mountain Laurel is bitter. Most people are very unlikely to consume over a cup of the bitter honey to get sick.

One of the best discussions about toxic honey I've seen comes from a regional beekeeping group, the Picken's County Beekeepers. Check out the details here.

Prepping for Honey

I have been asked a lot recently about honey. No we don't have honey yet, but the bees do!  In the top of the hive, in the honey supers, honey is being added every day. The supers had some weight to them but weren't quite full last week. 

A full honey super can weigh 40lbs. Now not all of that is honey, but most of it is. In the bottom boxes where the baby bees live, we use 10 frames per box and that is what the hive is designed to hold. That gives a maximum amount of frames and wax for the bees while maintaining bee space. Bee space is the distance between frames. Bees have a certain amount they really like.

I cheat.  I use that knowledge to make my life easier. In the honey supers or honey boxes, I use nine frames evenly spaced. The top picture shows a frame comb that I use to evenly space nine frames in a 10 frame box. This encourages the bees to build out the frame farther so they maintain their bee space and make it easier for me to harvest the honey.

Yeah, I am sneaky like that. 

This is a quick picture of Snow's hive. She is also known as Hive 1. She and her bees are doing nicely at the moment bringing back loads of pollen and nectar. We really need rain to plump up the nectaries in the flowers. 

Go bees!

Tasting Honey

Learning to distinguish various flavors in honey - or really any food - takes some time and lots of sampling!  We had a packed house at the most recent Honey Tasting in Brookline, NH  at the Brookline Public Library.  Thanks to everyone who took time out of their busy Thursday to join us!!

Everyone got to try and identify a few mystery honeys - supermarket honey, orange blossom, blueberry, and more!  And we realized two things - honey has a lot more flavors than anyone expected and it was hard to put a name to them!

Then we sampled honey from all  over the US and world. What a great souvenir honey makes! Honey provides a true local flavor and often results in the most beautiful conversations.

Do you have a favorite flavor of honey? Orange blossom is the favorite of many folks over 60 as this was a big favorite in supermarkets "way back when...."

Stay tuned for a report on the new queens and how everyone is settling this spring!

Honey harvesting

I am always amazed at the difference between summer and fall honey. This is all we have left of our summer honey on the right and the darker, bolder fall honey is on the left. It was a slim harvest for us. The bees in one hive just didn't produce much at all this year while the other was nicely productive.

My husband loves to help with harvest even when that means he's on cleaning duty. Here he is cleaning out a box that will go into storage this winter. 

Our productive hive really liked making wax. Normally we keep enough frames in the hives for the bees to fill with honey, but apparently I left an open spot. It wasn't empty for that long. The bees made a frame to fill the space. These bees are quite dark and that is generally true of all the bees in this hive. Some of the daughter workers have virtually no yellow on them anywhere. This is in contrast with our other hive where this fall's new bees are very golden in color.

Typically beekeepers assume that darker bees are more temperamental. In this case my experience belies that notion. These bees are lovely to work yet they also produce good amounts of honey.

Varietal Honey

How does a beekeeper harvest varietal honey?  Once again just like wine, when you have a varietal honey it is from a single source. That means that blueberry honey is harvested from blueberry flowers, orange blossom honey from orange blossoms, and ...well you get the picture.

So how could that work?

A beekeeper will put a honey super, the smaller box where the honey is stored, on top of a hive near at least two acres of a particular kind of flower, say cranberries, just as the flowers are getting started. Then the bees go and suck up all the lovely nectar from the cranberry flowers, bring that  back to the hive, and make honey in the super.

Bees have this really wonderful single-mindedness that varietal honey makers exploits. When a forager  bee has a strong nectar source, think acres and acres of cranberries, she tells all her sisters about it. They go out and enjoy it returning to the hive to tell more bees about it. Soon the whole cadre of foragers is on the cranberry flowers and little or nothing else.

Just as the blossoms are fading, the beekeeper returns to the picture. She cannot be late or the bees will start adding honey from the next flower in bloom in the area. She will take the honey super off and do one of two things. She can put a new super on or move the bees.

The beekeeper extracts the honey and now has a varietal honey, in this case, cranberry honey.  What is the point of doing such a thing? I think it is two things. First taste - varietal honey has a wonderful palate of colors and flavors. Second money - varietal honey commands a premium price. There are some terrifically rare honeys that are quite expensive.

Some of my favorites are:
*Lavender - super light and floral
*Clethra - also light and delicate with a delightful aftertaste
*Blueberry - medium colored with a strong fruitiness - rarely crystallizes

A few others I've tried are:
*Manuka - tea tree honey - medicinal and camphory {shiver}
*Buckwheat - dark, mahogany colored - I can't get over the grassy taste

Honey Terrior

Eating most honey is just plain yummy but my mission is to turn you into honey connoisseurs!

Honey, like wine, has terrior.  There are lots of formal definitions of this but really they mean it has a sense of place. Honey also tastes like a terrior at a specific time too. Stick with me here. Different wild flower honeys taste different depending on where they were made but also when.

Spring honey is always the lightest of the year no matter where you harvest in the northern hemisphere.  Fall honey is the darkest.

Here's how you can taste honey.  Put a small amount in your mouth - half a teaspoon or so. Roll it around in your mouth so it reaches your body temperature. Slowly, slowly swallow it. Breath in through your nose and out your mouth.

Spring or summer wildflower honey is the one you want for toast or in tea. Try it drizzled over goat cheese or fruit. Generally this honey is floral and sweet. Our honey also has a strong after taste of Black Locust.

Fall wild flower honey is darker and bolder. This is the honey you to bake with as its assertive flavor will stand up to other flavors. Try this in apple pie or in a honey cake. Our fall honey has a strong maple like flavor and an earthy finish.

Varietal honey is honey that is made from a single type of flower like Orange Blossom or Blueberry. This is challenging to make as a beekeeper and often commands higher prices as well. Aside from taste, some varietal honeys will crystallize at different rates and may have different antibacterial properties.

If you are interested in a formal honey tasting, let me know. I have led them at the Millbury Public Library in the past. If you are not local to me, I would recommend Red Bee. Marina sells a mini honey tasting kit.

Give Bees a Chance...

Give Bees a Chance.  That's what is on the back of the colorful shirts you can see here at the most recent outdoor meeting of the Worcester County Beekeepers Meeting. This one was in Sutton and it was a nice hot day with clear weather.

Ken Warchol, Bee Inspector and fabulous teacher is showing how to do an assessment for mites.  This isn't for the faint of heart or the casual beekeeper, this is serious science. The idea is that you should test to determine if you you need to treat for mites by sampling about 150 bees from a hive. Ken demonstrated the sampling in a lovely and elegant fashion. Ken scoops just the right number of bees into alcohol and the rest remain undisturbed.

Me, well, lovely and elegant my sampling is not. I shake a frame of bees, nurse bees specifically, into a wash tub and scoop them with a measuring cup.  One cup of bees is about 150.  I knew you'd want to know.

After you have soaked the bees in the alcohol, you strain out the bees and pour the liquid through a coffee filter. Then you count. I love data!

Look closely at the filter. Really closely... there are three mites on the paper. You should treat if you have more than eight or nine mites. This sample is post treatment.  If you treat early in the year, you should retest. 

So how did my bees do? Our girls were fine. We had a good but not crazy high mite load in August so I treated. I did treat all three hives even though it might not have been necessary to treat the split hive (Cerulean's hive). They haven't really had enough time to get high mite levels. Nonetheless, I treated all the hives since they are in close proximity to the other hives.

Treating for mites can take many forms. We use formic acid and this is normally found in a hive but in low levels. We want to blast those nasty mites away from the bees. Blast we did and there are two potential consequence to this treatment in addition to fewer mites. First, and I quote here, the queen will have a  renewed  vigor in laying. That is exactly what happened in two hives. The queens are laying like crazy.

And second, you can lose a queen. That is exactly what is happening in one hive. The queen didn't die from the treatment but it messed with her something fierce. Her laying pattern is terrible and there aren't many larvae. It isn't a laying worker, it is a queen but a bad one. And the workers know it.  They are ready to toss her to the curb. The new queen should be out in the next week and I already have a great name for her. Just wait!

Finally, thank you to everyone who has purchased honey, hand cream, beeswax, and honey sticks. This helps to support the bees. We are not sold out, but there isn't much summer honey at the moment in our store. If you want some, drop me a line. Fall honey, hopefully, will be on the way in another month.

In my next post, I will give you some of my favorite uses of honey.  And it isn't just eating.

Honey Bottling

We do! We bottled the last of this year's honey and we have about 25 lbs for sale (in 1 lb Papa Bear plastic bottles). If you are interested, just let us know. The honey is a rich red amber color and has a wonderful figgy flavor. This would be perfect for baking, drizzling over goat cheese, or pouring over pancakes.

Care and feeding of honey

I've had a few folks ask me about crystallized honey. Crystallized honey is perfectly safe to eat and hasn't gone bad. Honey contains so little water that it can crystallize over time. Here are three things you can do with it:

1. Use it as is - it might be grainy feeling on your tongue, but it will measure and taste the same.

2. Warm it up - pour water hot from your kitchen tap into a pot. Put the jar of honey in the pot for a while and it will eventually liquefy. Don't heat the honey up, it can change the characteristics and damage some of the nutrients.

3. Put it in the sun - if you have a sunny window sill, you can put the honey in the sun and it will eventually liquefy. Sun exposure may darken your honey but it won't hurt it.

If you really don't want your honey to crystallize, consider keeping it in the freezer. Crystals form best at room temperature, so put a large container in the freezer and use it fill up a smaller container for daily use.

Keep your honey at room temperature so it doesn't absorb moisture. With proper care honey can last forever. That is if you can resist eating it!

Spence Fair

I had a great time at the Spencer Fair this year. We got a second place ribbon and I was blown away by this. Our honey is the most competitive class of honey - amber. The exhibit was just too linty this year to be blue-ribbon quality.

We also have a new beekeeper, Rob McNeil, in town and I helped him with his exhibit. His honey is darker and he got a blue ribbon!! {happy dance}

We volunteer at the honey booth every year and for me, the time just flew by. I spent about 5 hours talking about bees to everyone and anyone who stood still for more than three seconds. There were two live bee exhibits and the bees were great to hang out with. The barn got really hot as the afternoon wore on and I think we were all in danger of melting.

Other than the bees, we petted chicks, checked out the cows, squished alpaca yarn, and got in all the military vehicles. And we ate from one end of the fair to the other. What more can you ask for?

Honey Harvest

We extracted honey last night and I am amazed at what a color difference there is between spring and summer honey. We are getting pretty fast at the extraction but it never stops being fun. As the honey spins out, the air becomes filled with the sweet scent of honey and my daughter tries to taste the air.

The bees help with the clean up and were really quick this time. We had about 13-14 frames and all our boxes. They look like they will be done before dark tonight.

This bee was taking a break from clean up to get her picture taken.

Irene and the bees

The bees came through the storm just fine. There were plenty of branches and leaves all over the bee deck, but I had taken frames and supers off of the hives on Saturday morning. It was misting lightly at the end and I felt like I was rushing.

The girls seem to be doing well but not producing a lot of honey. This is a dearth - few plants are producing nectar right now. I noticed no nectar at all in any of the hives. Bees will often start eating their honey stores at this time of year if the queen continues to lay eggs. With mostly-Italian queens, they continue to lay so honey stores are very important.

Earlier this year I took honey out of the brood supers since I wanted the queens to have plenty of space to lay. Since today looks great and the kids are FINALLY back to school, I am going to give them back some of that honey. I will diluted it slightly so it can flow out of my feeders.

Honey

At EAS, I got to meet and talk with Marina Marchese from Red Bee. She wrote a book about her adventures as a beekeeper, Honeybees Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper. It was cool to hear about her book it was AMAZING to do a honey tasting with her. She elevates it to an art form. Everything was gorgeous from the glasses to the honey to atmosphere. She really set a great tone to the event.

She set up about a dozen wine glasses each filled half way with honey and arranged lightest to darkest. We got tasting spoons and were give a list of characteristics to smell, look and taste for. I was about honey-ed out by the end and the last couple blurred together. I don't generally care for dark honey anyway so it was no big deal to me. However, dark honey got my attention with the Tulip Poplar, while dark, is quite fruity and lovely smelling.

She also offered some tropical honey and Manuka honey. Manuka is from the Tea Tree plant and is possibly the most horrific thing I have ever eaten. It brought tears to my eyes it was so awful tasting.

All in all, it was an unforgettable experience. Marina was generous with her knowledge and joy of bees and all things honey. Check out her website, www.RedBee.com.

Quality time with the bees

I spent nearly three hours with the bees today. I had to refill my smoker twice, but it stayed lit! I feel like I haven't really spent a lot of time with the bees this summer - life has just gotten in the way and I have been more of a bee-haver than a beekeeper. This is just not how I want to live my life - keeping bees just helps to keep me in a good place.

We are experiencing a dearth right now. This means that there are very very few plants with nectar and pollen. Leave the clover in your lawn if you can.

Soo what's happening in the hives, you wonder and how about that honey...

Well, Sun's hive is just fabulous. There are gobs of bees and they are working to fill the four honey supers on there. I way over did it and they would be fine with three, but had the extra one and they are working it. They don't have a lot of pollen, which is a concern. She has a great laying pattern.

While I was working the colony, I had it open for a while. We got an unexpected visitor. Look on the bottom of the picture on the edge of the box. A bumble bee flew in and walked down in the frames. I was so surprised. She actually went down on a frame and only popped out a few moments later. The honeybees just ignored her.

Magenta's hive is doing well. They aren't putting up much honey but that is fine. There was a good amount of larvae but once again, not quite as much pollen as I would like to see. I took a couple of frames of honey from them.

True's hive is a hot mess. They are once again superceding. This is not an emergency supercedure - there are four cells that I could fine and they all are pretty big. Only three have larvae in them. If you look carefully you can see one of the princess in the top most cell - there is a blob of white. That blob is a combination of the larva and the royal jelly they are feeding her. She is positively swimming which means that they are doing well as a colony.

The other things on the frame that look like bullets are drone cells. Drones are bigger than worker bees so their cells stick out a bit.

Strangely enough, these bees were really calm even though I had to take their hive down nearly to the bottom board. They have some honey put up but I didn't take any yet.

I am going to try and get honey extracted for the fair again this year. I will be defending champ and there are no duplicate names on the trophy I have. My expectations are quite low since I am extracting quite late, but we shall see.

Crystalized Honey

Does that little bit of honey at the bottom of the jar have crystals in it? Did your jar turn solid in your cupboard?

No worries! Your honey has not gone bad. In fact honey doesn't spoil. Honey was found in jars in Egyptian tombs and was still delicious.

You can do one of two things:
1. Nothing - crystallized honey can be used in any way liquid honey is used.
2. Re-liquefy it - just put the jar or plastic bottle in warm water from the tap. Let it sit until the honey is liquid or the water cools. Repeat until liquid.

Microwave? I don't recommend microwaving the honey more than 5-10 seconds TOTAL. The pollen and delicate flavors can be destroyed by very high temperatures.

Go honey!

Bee's Knees Brownies

1 cup butter, the real stuff
1 oz unsweetened chocolate, chopped
1 1/4 cup honey from happy bees
1 tsp good vanilla
3 large eggs from a local farm
1/3 cup cocoa
1 cup unbleached flour
1 cup of pecans, roughly chopped

Preheat oven to 350' and grease a 9x12 pan.

Melt butter and chocolate in a water bath (for me that is a glass bowl nestled in a small pot with water it). Mix until very smooth. Add honey and vanilla and let cool. Whip the eggs until frothy and add a small amount of the chocolate to temper the eggs. Then add the remaining chocolate. Add cocoa and flour and stir until just moistened. Pour in to pan and top with nuts.

Bake 35 minutes or until a tooth pick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool completely before cutting and use a very sharp knife when you do.

Brownies for the fair

After much experimenting and many emails from the talented Andrea, I think I've got it. I changed a few ingredients, but mostly changed the preparation of the brownies. They are really good. You can see they are dusted with cocoa on top, but with the amount of honey in the recipe, it will be absorbed in no time!

As you can see, there are two lovey jars of golden goodness perched next to the brownies. I am bringing honey again this year. This will be our third year exhibiting honey and I expect to be in the light amber category. Last year our honey was much darker.

The honey this year is mighty tasty, but if you've been reading this blog for over a year, you might remember that the Spencer Fair is a beauty contest. A mere 10 out of 100 points are awarded for taste. The remainder is all about looks, baby. I've been polishing and banishing bubbles all morning. The honey looks great. Let's hope the judges agree!

Normally I'd say I had butterflies, but perhaps today I should rephrase that and say I have honeybees in my stomach. Judging is tonight after 6pm.

We are going to the fair to help with the WCBA Honey booth on Saturday afternoon. If you are in the area, come on by and say hello.

Honey Harvest

We harvested honey for a second time this year and got about 50lbs. It was a long day but made extra fun by my mom, my husband's mom, his grandmother, and my sister joining in on the fun. We were hoping for a larger harvest but were foiled by Joy.

Yes Joy - the queen who likes to do her own thing got on top of the queen excluder and well, did what queens do, she laid eggs. Sigh. So we took the offending excluder off.

A queen excluder is a grid with openings that are too narrow for the queen to go thru. You place it above your brood boxes, where the queen is suppose to live to keep her out of the honey boxes. Now we have learned the lesson that it can work both ways - it will keep her out of the brood boxes if she's in the honey super.

My six year old, was in the honey and wax from the first cut and declared the honey GREAT!

The good, the bad and the painful

First the bad.
We didn't find any young larvae in Joy's hive. We went in to give them some empty frames so she'd have room to lay eggs. We found plenty of capped brood, meaning the larvae are at least nine days old. We gave the hive a frame with young eggs (under three days) just in case. Just in case what you wonder... in case Joy is no more. They can make a new queen out of any old tiny egg. If she is there and doing well, then these eggs will be just a bit more brood - no harm done..

The good.
Sun's hive is rockin'! We took seven frames of people honey from her hive - yep you read right - PEOPLE HONEY. Whoo hoo. Sun had lots of brood and honey. We extracted honey from ten frames in total and got about three gallons. Yay!

The fabulous.
Rose's daughter is gorgeous! Yep, we actually got to see her in all her magnificence. She's a really nice size and the bees are quite plentiful in this hive despite swarming. (Which, we never did see.) I would have taken pictures, but I was too scared to remember! No name yet, but I am still taking suggestions.

The painful.
After coming in from extracting, I thought to myself that it has been over a year since I'd gotten stung. Ahhh the hubris. Sure enough, I went out to plant some basil I got at the Millbury MOMS Club Annual Banquet and a bee got caught in my hair. You can guess the rest of the story. Mike was amazing and got the stinger out super fast.

Let me know if you are interested in purchasing honey this year - we will be selling again in August! Yay bees.