Paying it forward

My mentor, Mary Duane, is fabulous and I miss her!  It seems like she was always taking my calls and emails about this, that or the other with the girls. She came dashing over when I was in a panic and she suffered through the Mean Bee Period.  She is a saint as far as I am concerned.

Alas as I get more experienced as a beekeeper, my emails, calls and visits are few and fewer.

But I actually have the opportunity to pay her kindness and good will forward. I am going to be helping mentor a new beekeeper in my community. I am beyond excited about this opportunity. He should be getting his first bees this spring and will be visiting my girls this weekend - if the snow (yes SNOW) cooperates at the temps really do reach the 50' promise of the meteorologists.

Bee School Tee shirts

This is the last day to order Bee School Tee shirts.

This is on the back:

And this will be front left: 

Colors are

honey

sky blue

orange

light green

lavender

heather gray

yellow haze

bright pink.

Drop me line if you want one - but don't wait, the orders go in tomorrow. 

prose and a new queen

Working the bees is generally poetry to me. The smell of the bees and their wax, the hum of their work, the zen rhythm of our movements together...

This day was not poetry. This day was entirely prose. 

I took down the dead colony and cleaned the hive. The weather was cool and the work was dirty. You wouldn't think the dead insects would be so grimy but it was. I cleaned each frame of any excess wax and propolis rendering my hive tool a mess and gloves no better. Soon sweat and blood added to the earthy mix.

The bees in the other colony did not seem to care about my presence so close to their home or perhaps it was smell of dead bees that held them at bay. Regardless, when I took off my gloves, I didn't worry about getting stung. 

It was easier anyway. I pulled the dead bees from the cells with my finger nails until I had added bee guts to my smear of filth covering my hands and hive tool. The veil soon followed so I could look for the queen in the mass of dead bees at the base of the bottom box. 

She was never found, but easily could have been there. The pile was much bigger and deeper than I originally suspected. 

So the hive boxes are cleaned and ready to go when I can get a queen from the remaining colony.

Those bees seemed to sense the need for a queen even it isn't exactly in their own hive. Their queen is laying beautifully - while she remains enigmatic, her eggs and larvae are abundantly evident. Along with a supercedure cell. If they make more than one, I will be ready to requeen shortly. 

One is the loneliest number...

We are down to one hive. Our smaller hive was fine at the February check and seem to be doing all right but not great. Yesterday, being 65' out in our yard, we headed out to bring honey and to a big check. There were only dead bees in one hive. Still so much honey it was very hard to lift the upper super and... ok this is kinda gross ... fairly freshly dead bees.

Freshly dead, I can hear you asking.

They weren't missing parts or particularly fragile and the freshly dead bees weren't dried out and crispy. Yeah, eeeww.

The remaining hive is a super looking hive and had a plethora of bees. (Yep, that's for your M!)

I am thinking that we might split the big hive early and either give them a queen if we can find a Yankee queen (one whose mother overwintered here) or let them make a queen (must wait for drones to be grown or she'll remain a virgin).

So, there is still time to plan but not much. Spring is coming early this year and pollen producing plants are out. The first flowers of the year are in bloom now and pollen is coming in.

You might not think much is happening this time of year in the hive, but you'd be totally wrong! Lots of stuff still happens in the winter although it doesn't take much care from me.

The queen has started laying eggs again. Yikes, you say - isn't it too cold. The worker bees (the girls who emerged in October and November) are using their body heat to warm up the hive from a nice 60' to 93'F. They aren't warming up the whole hive, just the part around the eggs. And we aren't talking hundreds of eggs yet, more like a handful at a time.

The bees are going out for their cleansing flights. Bees don't pee or poop in the hive so on balmy days like tomorrow is supposed to be in our area, they will go out and do their business. If you look carefully in the picture, all the little yellow spots are ... well bee pee. Expect it again tomorrow!

And what are beekeepers doing in the winter?  We this one is missing her girls and planning the spring split. I am going to take a few frames from my strongest hive and start a new colony. I am also assessing what equipment I need to purchase, repair and build. Being one hive short has given me plenty of equipment, but I need to get better landing board/bottom board combos. Right now they don't fit. The landing board is just where the bees land when they come into the hive. While not strictly necessary, I think it looks good.

I am also going to have to make a pile of new frames. The dying hive got wax worms - {shiver} yeck!  So a number of frames are going to have the wax cut out and new foundation put in its place. I usually replace the foundation in about 1/5 of my frames each year, but this year I plan to do a bigger replacement.

Why you ask?  Well at a conference last summer I learned about all the pesticides that build up in wax and decided that this spring we will be more rigorous about getting rid of wax older than five years.

I have also been reading. A lot. Which is no surprise to any of you who know me well. The librarians all recognize my voice from "hello" when I call. I will share my reading shelf in another post!

And that is what beekeepers do in the winter.

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.

Snow!

We got snow over the weekend and this post is late because we were without power for three days. The bees seem to have weathered the storm fine and there were no branches down that impacted the girls. We cut down the one tree that touched the hives after the Ice Storm of 2008.

You can see that I started to winterize the hives with insulation around three sides and an extension to the roof. I still need to get hay bales behind them to cut off the wind. Once all the leaves drop, there is a good wind corridor behind them.

Today should be warm enough with temps expected near 60' to go out into the hives to complete winter preparation. Crazy weather.