Summer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Summer Moon<\/p>\n
Mark and Elise came over today.\u00a0 We wandered through the garden and the orchard, followed by Rigel and Vega.\u00a0 They licked and pressed and jumped.\u00a0 New people!\u00a0 New people!\u00a0 Oh, boy!\u00a0 Oh, boy!\u00a0 New people!\u00a0 Rigel and Vega found Leif and Tate and Tate’s twin really, really interesting.\u00a0 Baby head!\u00a0 Baby head!\u00a0 Oh, boy!\u00a0 Oh, boy!<\/p>\n
Mark and I went out to the hive and popped the lid after suiting up.\u00a0 The smoker worked better today, but I’ve still not got it down.\u00a0 There are a lot of bees.\u00a0 I thought so, but Mark confirmed it.\u00a0 There are lots of brood, plenty of honey and a few uninhabited queen cells.\u00a0 We scraped and checked each of the 20 frames, leaving two frames out to insert into the new box we put on top.\u00a0 The hive is now three boxes high, its maximum.<\/p>\n
Next week or so, the honey supers go on the third box.\u00a0 About half the size of a hive box the supers fill up with honey.\u00a0 They are the work product that goes into the centrifuge for extraction.\u00a0 A typical super has about 30 pounds of honey.\u00a0 Seems like a lot to me.<\/p>\n
Mark finds the bees fascinating per se, the honey a bonus that sometimes pays for the bees and the equipment in a given year.\u00a0 I agree.\u00a0 The hive construction project alone interests me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u00a0 complicated dance.<\/p>\n
Many bee keepers work without suits and gloves.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Summer Moon Mark and Elise came over today.\u00a0 We wandered through the garden and the orchard, followed by Rigel and Vega.\u00a0 They licked and pressed and jumped.\u00a0 New people!\u00a0 New people!\u00a0 Oh, boy!\u00a0 Oh, boy!\u00a0 New people!\u00a0 Rigel and Vega found Leif and Tate and Tate’s twin really, really interesting.\u00a0 Baby head!\u00a0 Baby … Continue reading Late June Hive Inspection<\/span>