• Tag Archives pollen patties
  • Bee Protein and Surge Protection

    Spring                                                                        Bee Hiving Moon

    Pollen patties came today. (see right) I’ll be out with the bees tomorrow, weather permitting.  They need the pollen patties for protein which they can’t yet find in adequate supply.  That means the season will have well and truly begun.

    To add to that sense we had, as we might expect in late April or early May, thunderstorms this morning around 5 am.  They woke the dogs, who began barking, barking, barking.  Well, I had to get up anyway to shut down our complement of electronic devices, so I let the dogs out.

    I’ve been shutting down computers and modems and routers for 18 years and have never had a problem.  My suspicion is that this is something I no longer need to do; but, like an old hoss, I always follow the path to the barn.  Even though the barn got pulled down years ago.

    When we first moved in, I had the electrician install surge protectors in the main junction box to forestall any lightning caused jump in current from frying our computers.  He thought this was the silliest idea, but I was paying so he did it anyhow.  That’s why I say I think I no longer need to do it.  Those surge protectors are still lit up after all these years.

    The route in that’s not protected is the cable from the cable junction box which sits at the northeastern edge of our property line.  If a lightning bolt hit it, that could fry the modem and the routers.  Again, never a problem.

     


  • Bee Diary: Keep On Keepin’ On

    Spring                                                           Full Bee Hiving Moon

    The die is cast again for this season.  Three packages, three three pound packages with around 8,000 bees each will arrive on Saturday.  I’m glad Kate convinced me to buy the larger package since the shipments experienced a two-week delay due to bad weather in California.  Gotta dig out the syrup spray bottle.  Started defrosting the pollen patties left over from last year.  Once done a couple of times hiving bees is not a formidable process, but it does require execution of several steps.

    I did learn why my divide failed.  When I requeened it in late summer after inadvertently killing the queen while checking for mites, I did what I thought was a slow release, but it turned to be a fast one.  I stuck a marshmallow in the end of the queen cage so that she and the workers could eat their way through it and come together in happiness and fertility for all.  In fact what I needed to do was put a piece of hard candy in the same place, something that takes four days for the workers and the queen to eat.  Over that length of time they become familiar with each other, old buddies, willing to cohabit without any smothering going on.

    As you know, royalty is not beheaded or shot, unless you’re uncivilized like the 17th century English, but instead have the garrote. The same thing is true for bees.  To kill a queen the workers form a ball around her, known as balling (a different use of this term was popular during my college days), and plug up the holes through she which she breathes.  Not a violent, but a certain, death.

    The queen is dead, long live the queen.  Yes, colonies will requeen themselves given time, but heading into the gales of November there is no time.  So the divide died an early death.

    The parent colony, I think, died from American Foul Brood.  At any rate I burned the hive boxes, frames and foundations.  Scorched earth against this plague.

    That leaves my strong package colony.  It looked good headed into winter.  Plenty of bees, what I thought was adequate honey supply and a fertile, young queen.  I’m not sure what happened here.  It could have been mites.  It could have been an inadequate honey supply.  It could have been its fate, woven elsewhere by Artemis and her court of virgin nymphs.  At this point I can only proceed with a completely new bee population and hope that last winter was an anomaly since it was from a weather perspective.

    Anyhow perseverance is the route to wisdom in beekeeping as in so many of life’s endeavors.  So, in the immortal words of Robert Crumb, we’ll just keep on truckin’.


  • More Bee Stuff

    Spring                                           Waxing Awakening Moon

    The bulk of the bee woodenware has come:  frames for honey supers, honey supers, foundations for honey supers, a bee brush, a feeder for syrup and a bunch of pollen patties and goop to make my own if I need to do so.   While this may seem like a lot of gear, and it is, by next year we should have four colonies with two producing a lot of honey and two ready to divide to create two more good honey producers and two more developing parent colonies that will provide the honey for the year after that.

    This system can work with any number of colonies, but if focuses on producing two at a time and can reach a steady state at any multiple of two.  In the first year (last year’s for me) the goal is to create a parent colony that can divide in mid-May.  With the division there are now two colonies, one with an established queen, the parent colony, and the division, which initially has no queen.  The parent colony produces a lot of honey while the division with a new queen builds itself up to three hive boxes and may produce some honey.  Over the winter the parent colony bees die out–the usual life span of a queen is two years and worker bees somewhere between 30 and 90 days on average.  The parent colonies hive boxes get cleaned out and accept the division from the new parent colony and so on.  By adding a new package of bees this year in a new hive box in the orchard, I’m preparing a parent colony for division next year there.

    After next year we will have four colonies, two producing a good bit of honey and two strengthening themselves toward division in the upcoming year.  With careful attention to bee diseases, hygiene and good management this can self-perpetuate.

    On April 24th or so I get my new 2 pound package of Minnesota Hygienic bees.  They’ll go in the orchard with the fancy new copper hivery top.  We’ll see these two hives out our kitchen window year in and year out so I wanted them to look good.  Mid-may I divide the old colony and start stacking up honey supers.  Then we should be off to the races.