Category Archives: Bees

Bees

A Real Honey

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Summer                              Waning Summer Moon

Today the queen excluder goes on my three hives after I shift the bottom to the top and the top to the bottom.  On top of the queen excluder goes two honey supers.  A honey super has half the depth of a hive box.  The queen excluder makes sure there is no brood in the part of the hive from which I will harvest the honey.

The bee keepers refer to this as the fun part, but I’ve enjoyed the whole process so far.  The learning curve, steep at times, has leveled off right now.  I can work the smoker, know how to check frames and have mastered at least some of the know how necessary to bee keeping.  The next lesson comes during the honey flow work.  After the honey flow stops in the fall, there is the question of hive maintenance over winter.  Over wintering comes later.  Now, the honey.

Bees

Late June Hive Inspection

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Summer                        Waxing Summer Moon

Mark and Elise came over today.  We wandered through the garden and the orchard, followed by Rigel and Vega.  They licked and pressed and jumped.  New people!  New people!  Oh, boy!  Oh, boy!  New people!  Rigel and Vega found Leif and Tate and Tate’s twin really, really interesting.  Baby head!  Baby head!  Oh, boy!  Oh, boy!

Mark and I went out to the hive and popped the lid after suiting up.  The smoker worked better today, but I’ve still not got it down.  There are a lot of bees.  I thought so, but Mark confirmed it.  There are lots of brood, plenty of honey and a few uninhabited queen cells.  We scraped and checked each of the 20 frames, leaving two frames out to insert into the new box we put on top.  The hive is now three boxes high, its maximum.

Next week or so, the honey supers go on the third box.  About half the size of a hive box the supers fill up with honey.  They are the work product that goes into the centrifuge for extraction.  A typical super has about 30 pounds of honey.  Seems like a lot to me.

Mark finds the bees fascinating per se, the honey a bonus that sometimes pays for the bees and the equipment in a given year.  I agree.  The hive construction project alone interests me.  The six sided cells, the propolis, drone, worker and queen cells, the making of honey and its storage reveal a life way and a life form unlike any we contact in the usual day to day.  There is more, too: the queen and her squadron of drones, hopeful suitors, all but one of whom will live and die unfulfilled, the solitary life of the queen, moving from cell to cell squeezing out egg after fertilized egg, the workers who build the cells and scout out food, coming back to communicate in a well known  complicated dance.

Many bee keepers work without suits and gloves.  Honey bees that survive our winters have a docile temperament and are not as defensive as the ordinary person would imagine, though Mark says they get more protective in the fall when the beekeeper begins to take the honey.   This might seem a bit cruel, but in fact the bulk of the honey, say 80-90 pounds, remains in the hive boxes and has enough nourishment for the hives to over winter.

Bees, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Smoke Gets In Your Bees

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Waning Days of Beltane                   Waning Dyan Moon

We near midsummer; it’s only 15 hours away.  The Summer Solstice, the hot sister of my favorite holiday, the Winter Solstice, comes to Minnesota at 12:47 am tomorrow, the early hours of father’s day.

To celebrate I plan to work outside in the garden and do some pre-Raphaelite reading, maybe look for a PRB take on midsommer.

To start, this morning I checked on the bees.  There are many, many more bees than came in the small wire and wood box in April.  They come and go, searching the area for nectar and finding plenty at this time of year with the bumper crops still ahead.  Nectar flow precedes honey flow and we are hind leg deep in pollen and nectar.

The bees did not meet the threshold of 8 sides substantially covered with brood that indicates the need for another hive box.  Maybe next week.

There must be a trick to getting the smoker lit and working.  It has challenged my bee-keeping more than the bees so far.  In order to use it  you have to a fuel burning, then smother it, but not put out the coals so the fuel will continue to smolder, producing smoke for the duration of your hive check.

Like many learning curves this one imposes a double penalty.  While taking time to keep the smoker lit and producing, I can not work the hives.  Once in the hives, which I work slowly anyway because I’m still learning, the smoker punking out (pun!) puts me at risk from angry bees.  Meanwhile back to the smoker which means I’m not checking the hive.  Normal learning process.  Frustrating and exhilirating.

Now for some deadheading, trellis building and potato and beet mounding.  Check you on the flipside.

Bees, Garden, permaculture

A Northern Summer Garden

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Beltane                        Waning Dyan Moon

The garden.  The squash and melons are up.  The beans have begun to put on second leaves, the peas have begun to climb the trellis and the cucumbers have their tendrils out for their trellis, too.  The garlic is not far from harvest and greens are in abundance.  Flowers are blooming and the bees are buzzing.  A garden that works.

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Family

Still sinking.

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Beltane                    Full Dyan Moon

Kate can tell when I begin to submerge, move below the surface of day to day contact.  I become short, irritable.  She gets the feeling of walking on egg shells.  By the time this happens I’m not in touch with my effect on the outside world.  Distraction and self-absorption reign.

She brings it up.  We talk.  Today I said, “I’ve moved into melancholy.”  The distance between closed.  We both know this journey and its dark side.  I ate my chirashi and she her teryaki bento box.

“What precipitated it?”

“I have no idea.  Chemicals, I think.”

“No. Wait.  It began, I think on Hilton Head.  Maybe it was the weather.  I now that sounds absurd, but then, I know it happens, too.  Gloomy outside, gloomy inside.”

“I love you.”  Said with the grasp of both the condition and the afflicted.  Therapy in their own right.

Otherwise, the day had bees and money.

Mark Nordeen came over and we popped the top on the second hive.  Lotsa bees.  Took a long while to get the smoker going.  The smoke calms them down.  They stop flying, go back into the hive.

The top hive had brood on several frames and the number of bees has tripled at least.  There were three queen cups and I got to see exactly what they looked like.

“If you ever see a queen cup that has a queen in it, don’t knock it off.  That means they’re about to swarm and you’ll need the second queen for those who stay behind.”

We moved the bottom hive on top because there had not been as much work done down there and we wanted to encourage more frames filled with brood.

Later in the morning we saw our cash-flow adviser.  We’ve done very well and continue to  do so, but as we move to retirement she says there is a big trick to moving from paid employment to retirement income.  In the case of Kate we’ve been lucky to have her producing large quarterly bonuses which have enabled us to do many different things:  dogs, permaculture, long trips.  After retirement, those kinds of bumps in income will disappear and we have to decide how to deal with that.  Turns out cash is the primary tool, having lots of it in liquid investments like CD’s, bonds or money market.

The moral here is that no matter how you feel, life goes on.  Decisions have to be made.  Bees need care.  The garden goes through its season.  There is something reassuring to the constancy and permanence of natural change.

Bees, Family, Woolly Mammoths

A Sunday

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Beltane                  Waxing Dyan Moon

A second cold wet day reminds me of the time I just spent on Hilton Head Island.  Why travel if I can experience a southern coastal climate right here in Minnesota?

The cold weather and drizzle today made working outside unattractive, not impossible, but I didn’t get out there.

Mark Nordeen intended to come over to check on the hive this morning, see if we need to put a third hive box on the two we have now.  He called and said bees don’t leave the hive when it’s cool and wet; they resent intrusion then so the better idea is to wait until the weather warms.  We settled on early Thursday.

This afternoon Melina, Taylor and Chaska Helgeson had a big graduation party with asian themed food and rapping by Nerve, aka Taylor Helgeson.  There were a number of people there, though few I knew.  Sarah and Paul Strickland were the only guests I recognized except for Stefan’s dad.

The noise and the mix of people made hearing difficult so I eased away after about an hour.

We spoke with Jon and Jen on Skype tonight.  Ruthie got an owie at a birthday party.  Gabe had an elbow bleed and required three doses of factor.  He has small veins so it took a lot of needle sticks.  It sound painful and frustrating.  Herschel, who has hemangiosarcoma, is home from the hospital and feeling pretty good.  He has three months as a prognosis.  Sad.

That’s about it.  A quiet Sunday.

Bees, Friends, permaculture

A Good Night at Cards

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Beltane                          Waxing Dyan Moon

“After another night of losing sheepshead, it finally came to me.  These guys have been playing a lot longer than I have.  Bill since childhood.  Roy and Dick since high school and Ed since entering the Jesuits.  Now I view them as my mentors.  That way I can lose and learn, instead of just lose.”   from a May 7, 2009 post after I finished at the bottom again.

Some nights the cards change and the tide flows with  you.  Last night I got great cards and did well.  Anything I’ve learned in this reprise of my brief sheepshead career in Appleton, Wisconsin, I’ve learned from these guys.

Those cells I thought were queen cells were drone cells.  Drones have a life devoted to the vain pursuit of sex.  Sounds like the American teenager when I grew up.  Drones fly out and around, hoping to find a queen who needs him.  This is a very rare occurrence, so only the most fortunate of these bee princes ever become king for a day.

Yesterday I planted squash, melons and beans, thinned the turnips and replanted carrots and beets.  The last time I dicentra09planted carrots and beets I didn’t water them in.  Probably should have.  The potatoes needed mounding and I discovered that the beets and turnips both benefit from mounding too.  If a portion of these tuberous vegetables stick up above ground, they turn green and inedible.

The red car got expensive again and will get a bit more so.  This time it needed a new radiator and coolant flush, a flush of brake fluid and steering fluid, a new transmission gasket and a flush of the transmission fluid with new replacement fluids.  It probably also needs a new master brake cylinder, but I said no to that out of sticker shock.  After consulting the mechanic, I’m going to order the part and have it replaced.  Suddenly having no brakes is not a good thing.

Bees

Queen Bees

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Beltane                  Waxing Dyan Moon

thebeekeeper Hat jauntily askew and ready to check on his bees.

The bees have been busy since I left two + weeks ago.  A lot more worker bees, probably three times than the original packagae, so maybe 24,000 bees.  Also a lot of queen cells so I think they are not far from swarming.  I have to contact Mark, my bee expert, and found out if I did the right preventative measures.  Using the hive tool, I opened the queen cells and destroyed the brood.

This sounds cruel, but the purpose of new queen cells at this point is to produce a swarm with its own queen.  Without them, they will continue to build more worker bees and produce honey in the hives.

Trellis and planting next.

Bees, Friends, Garden

Hive 2 In Place

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Beltane                     Waning Flower Moon

Mark came over and we suited up.  The bees have been busy.  I saw the small larvae curled up in the very bottom of a comb’s cell, several of them.  We investigated each frame, finding one frame with many capped cells, maybe 60%.  The bees did not seem interested in us.  We only used the smoke once and that was as we removed a frame with a large number of bees working on it.

Mark said it was a little early, but we decided to put hive 2 in place, moving up into it one of the frames with brood and spreading the others out a bit on the bottom since it left only 9 frames below out of 10.  Much of this management of the hive involves swarming.  If the bees feel their space has become  too cramped, some of the hive, maybe all, will fly away into a tree, then send out scouts for a more roomy place.  This means less to no honey at the end of the season.

After this next phase, we will switch the top one onto the bottom and put the bottom on it.  The third and last hive goes on top of both of them.  After this last swap, the supers go on.

Lydia came over from next door.  She’s going to do some weeding and some heavier work like taking out yew that died over the winter.  Much of her initial weeding will happen over the week we’re gone.  It will be good to have some help.  Weeding becomes a chore around this time of year.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Bee-ing

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Beltane                      Waning Flower Moon

Tomorrow morning Mark Nordeen and I will zip up our white bee suits, put on Wellies and gloves, secure the veiled bonnet that makes us look like prim Victorian ladies headed for a stroll in Hyde Park circa 1880 and do the third check on the bee hive.

When I checked it a week ago, I saw capped cells and a lot of activity.  As I’ve watched scouts come and go over the last week, I’ve noticed that between 1/4 and 1/3 of them return with pollen on their hind legs.  This is a key transition, meaning they will be able to make their own food, wax and propolis.

As each new piece has become a part of our overall property, the gestalt increases.  It grows in size, has grown in size, from the first decisions about boulder walls and perennial flowers, through bulb planting, hosta and ferns, the multiplication and division of iris, day lilies, true lilies, hosta, bug bane, ligularia, dicentra.  When Kate began to grow vegetables, the gestalt pushed out some more.

Hiring Ecological Gardens and putting in the orchard last fall has pushed the boundaries of the whole further out, while integrating it more.  The bees have added an animal component, a lively and complex bee-ing.

Growing vegetable plants from seed under lights, then planting them outside adds another layer.  The work that Ecological Gardens plans for May 26 and May 27 will enrich it yet again.

The feeling is hard to express, but wonderful.  Mabye the bee hive is a good analogy.  It feels to me like the whole property has become an interdependent whole, with the land working for us and us working for the land.  I’m not talking about just food production.  The beauty of the flowers, the grace of the ferns, the broad green presence of the hosta are part of it, too.  Each part feeds into and amplifies the other.  The bees enhance the fruit trees, the vegetables and the flowers; in turn they provide pollen to the hive.  We care for the whole and harvest food, aesthetic pleasure and a sense of connectedness.