Lughnasa                                                                  Moon of the First Harvests

Drove out near Stillwater today to Nature’s Nectar, a bee supply store.  Picked up some miticide and some honey robber.  Also, some knowledge.  Geez, hard to believe I missed in this school.  “Never,” said Jim, proprietor and keeper 0f 75 colonies, “Never do extraction outside.”  Oh.  Well.  I know why.  The bees all come and want some.  But doing it inside never seemed like an option.  Now, all of a sudden, it does.  Cardboard, plastic sheeting and everything inside where there are no bees.  Would be way simpler.

(note:  outside)

On the way out the clear blue sky with cirrus horse tails high and wispy kept firing memories of Canada.  A magical place, in my experience, a place I could live easily.   This sky, wonderful.

Summer                                                                  Moon of the First Harvests

As you will see in the picture below, the colony now has six honey supers. This means beekeeping is over until the honey harvest since I won’t add more supers and I don’t inspect the hives during the nectar flow.

This year we plan to pay close attention to the varroe mites and treat them if necessary.  I hope that will increase the likelihood of this colony surviving the winter, giving me two colonies for next spring.  I have a new site picked out for the bees.  It has southern exposure, protection from the northwest winter winds and is close to the honey house.  I will move the hive in the winter though I plan to prepare the site in the fall.  My goal going forward will be to keep four hives, two parent colonies (honey producers) and two colonies for overwintering, then dividing in the spring.

Summer                                                             Moon of the First Harvests

A possibly record honey harvest.  From just one hive.  Not sure how to account for the situation but this plucky little colony has put weight (honey) in all four honey supers, at least one is full, and that meant I had to add a fifth and sixth.  The colony plus supers now exceeds my 5′ 7″ so I had to use a ladder to add the last two boxes.

(Artemis Hives titular deity)

When I went outside today, sweatshirt on (for the long sleeves and bulk), gloves (I am trainable.) and the veil, it was like moving in pea soup.  It was the heat and the humidity. Caring for multiple hives in this kind of weather would be brutal.

BTW:  You’re not considered past the amateur or hobby level beekeeper until your number of colonies passes 50.

Summer                                                               Moon of the First Harvests

Slow learner.  Yesterday, in the blistering heat, Javier and his brother and another worker dug up grass in our orchard, a job for which they will be well compensated, but still under difficult working conditions. They did choose the day, btw.

But.  In the orchard I have my one bee colony.  I decided to help them by clearing out the grass in front of the hive after smoking the bees.  Smoked the bees, knelt down and began using my Japanese weeding knife to pull out clumps of grass.  Fine.  Then I got closer to the hive where some of the girls were hanging out on the ground, enjoying the cool sand there.  I had put on the veil (all the stings on my head two years ago convinced me that was a good idea.) but no gloves.

This won’t take long.  He thought.  And, yes, soon after I began digging up the grass near the lounging workers, some of them got up from the sand and lanced my left hand.  Ouch.  One sting right on the fleshy part of my thumb hurt like, well, like ouch!  So, this is the way the slow learner gets the message, always always always wear gloves if digging in front of the hive.  In behavioral psychology they call this aversive conditioning.  It works.

Summer                                                             New (First Harvest) Moon

Checked the bees this morning and to my happy surprise found one honey super full and the second with weight.  I added two more, shifting the full one and the partially full one to the top and the empties to the bottom.  I also added a queen excluder between the three hive boxes and the honey supers.  This prevents the queen, who should still be in the bottom or second from bottom hive box since my reversal, from laying brood in the honey supers.

(pic:  the colony with two honey supers on last week.  I added the second two today)

The nectar flow is running strong right now and the colony is also strong.  The right combination.  “Nectar flow is when one or more major nectar sources are blooming and the weather is cooperating, allowing bees to collect the nectar.”  Sweet clover is blooming now as well as

Summer                                                                              Solstice Moon

This movie is coming to the Lagoon on July 12.  I’ve lost 4 colonies in the past two years.  This is not an abstract or faraway issue.  It’s right here.  At home.

More Than Honey

“Over the past 15 years, numerous colonies of bees have been decimated throughout the world, but the causes of this disaster remain unknown. Depending on the world region, 50% to 90% of all local bees have disappeared, and this epidemic is still spreading from beehive to beehive – all over the planet.

In the US, the latest estimates suggest that a total of 1.5 million (out of 2.4 million total beehives) have disappeared across 27 states. In Germany, according to the national beekeepers association, one fourth of all colonies have been destroyed, with losses reaching up to 80% on some farms.

More than Honey – Markus Imhoof (Official Trailer) from CIBER Science on Vimeo.

Scientists have found a name for the phenomenon that matches its scale, “colony collapse disorder,” and they have good reason to be worried: 80% of plant species require bees to be pollinated. Without bees, there is no pollinization, and fruits and vegetables could disappear from the face of the Earth. Apis mellifera (the honey bee), which appeared on Earth 60 million years before man and is as indispensable to the economy as it is to man’s survival.

Should we blame pesticides or even medication used to combat them? Maybe look at parasites such as varroa mites? New viruses? Travelling stress? The multiplication of electromagnetic waves disturbing the magnetite nanoparticles found in the bees’ abdomen? So far, it looks like a combination of all these agents has been responsible for the weakening of the bees’ immune defenses.”

This last position is the one taken by Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota Bee Lab.  She won a MacArthur Grant for her work.

Summer                                                                           Solstice Moon

After visiting the bees with Ruth yesterday, I got on a couple of websites just to review this time of year.  Discovered that the nectar flow will start in 10-15 days, a bit delayed by the cool spring, which is good news for us beekeepers because it means the hives have had a good length of time to build up a colony.

(the girls in the nursery–brown capped cells–and adding pollen–the cells with yellow deposits in them.)

This year I just have the one colony, but it has energy to burn.  Bees flowing over the tops of the frames, building out frames of honey which I’ve harvested. This colony will almost certainly fill up the third hive box with honey and have plenty of work left over to produce honey in honey supers.  Unusual, but not unheard of for a first year colony.  In a normal year I would have to wait until next year to harvest honey after I divide this colony.

Went back to the hive boxes today to check on swarm cells which I didn’t do with Ruth yesterday.  I tipped up the hive boxes, checked underneath and saw none of the long cells that mean a colony has decided it’s time to find a new place to live.  Whew.

I did a reversal, putting the bottom hive box in the middle, the middle box on the bottom and the third hive box which I put on yesterday, back on top.  In ten days or so I’ll put a queen excluder on the top box, then begin adding honey supers two at a time.

It may be that I hit a learning plateau back in the late winter, no doubt pushed by the thirty to fifty stings I got at the end of the harvest two years ago.  I was ready to give it up, throw in the hive tool, hang up my bee suit.  You know.  Glad I didn’t.  I’m having more fun with it this year than I ever have.