Recovery

We had another bear attack a few weeks ago, this one on the two hives in our own yard.  Eric did his best to slap the hives back together, and then I picked up queen cells form a local master beekeeper, to help the hives recover with strong, new queens.

This afternoon, after face painting and balloon twisting in Ramsey, Eric and I finally had a non-rainy, fairly sunny-ish day to check on the bees!  Miracle of miracles!

So we took advantage of the opportunity and checked to see what was doing.

In the first photo, you can see a big empty space in the hive, which the bees are filling in with honeycomb.  Bees don't like spaces, and fill it - the larger ones with comb, the smaller ones with propolis.  This space was caused by the mess Eric faced when he put the hives back together post-attack, and he wasn't able to get all ten frames in there.  We're really going to have to figure out what to do about that, but right now, we're happy to let them have it so we don't kill the pupae in there and diminish their impending population.  In that photo, you can also see the very top of the queen cell that Eric installed, that green plastic cap is what it's attached to.  In the second photo is the bottom view of the same queen cell, with a nice round hole.  The queen hatched out, and hopefully is prepping for mating or is working on mating. 

We question what's going on a bit, because although we saw brood, we also saw a LOT of queen cells on that hive, built by the colony's workers themselves.  They're sealed and not hatched yet.  You can see them in the third photo - the ones hanging down looking like peanuts.  The bees build them out and down like that because queen bees need to grow bigger than workers, and will need that space.

In photo 4, you can see capped over honeycomb cells, which contain worker pupae.  We can tell by the way the caps look.  They're tan, rather than white (which would contain honey), and flat, rather than bumps (which would contain drones).  In the open cells, you can also see larvae, white worm-like bee babies.  The ones that pretty much fill their cells are obviously older than the ones that have smaller larvae set farther in.

Happily, in one of the photos, I also got a really nice shot of a drone, photo 5.  Those are the male bees, identifiable by their rounder, fatter abdomens (not really visible in the photo), and also their HUGE eyes, which are visible.  Aren't they crazy?

The sixth and seventh photos are just great shots of larvae and capped worker brood, in which pupae are busy growing, respectively.

And the eighth and ninth photos are photos of foragers coming on back home.  You can see the bright yellow pollen packed onto their back legs, and if you look closely, you can see one with red pollen.  I'd love to know what flora that's from!

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I was being a bit of a brute, and took two stings to my upper, inner thigh through my jeans.  I'm glad to have the first ones over with, and with some apple cider vinegar topically and a dose of prednisone, I'm absolutely fine.

The end result?  Both hives look good, and we added honey supers, hoping that they give us a crop this year.  The resource hive that Eric used to make a small colony looks amazing, so we put on a second level.  And since we had so many more frames with queen cells (more than the one in the photo here), we took a few to try more colonies in two more resource hives.  Theoretically, we could have five hives by the end of the season.  That would be nice after all the losses!

There's a Reason I've Been So Quiet

Lots of reasons, actually.  They boil down to:  We've been busy!  Insanely busy.  And I've been downright lazy about keeping up here.  But at least now you get a ton of photos!

We had a warm spell back in the winter/early spring, which got the queen bees laying new brood early... and then a really cold snap that kept us from getting into the hives to do splits.  And then warmth... and then rain that again kept us from getting into the hives.

As a result, were dealing with swarms from all our hives for the entire spring and into the summer, in addition to the nucs we bought.  It was exhausting.  Eric was working from home a lot, and our friend Carol, who was a brand new beek and our mentee this season, also works from home, so they spent every day chasing swarms all over town.  We have one tree in the backyard we dubbed "the swarm tree," and at one point, it had three swarms in residence.

We weren't able to catch them all, and lost a lot of bees.  On top of that, we had bear attacks that took out six of the twenty-four hives to which we'd built up.  We tried combining, requeening, and did what we could.  It was a tough season that resulted in much more work and less honey than we anticipated, and us being down to eight hives now.  Fingers crossed they all make it through winter!

Agriculture is rough.  Love it anyway, even through the occasional tears.

On top of all of that, there's We Bee-lieve!  Eric and I have formed a NJ domestic nonprofit corporation to bring bees to kids and vice versa.  Feel free to visit the site or Facebook page (and "like" it to keep up with our doings!  We're on Instagram too!  The plan is doing bee talks, which we've already started (photos on the Facebook page and Instagram), plus put hives in depressed areas and teach kids everything from how to make seed bombs and what pollinators do all the way up to how to be beekeepers.  We have our five inaugural hives on the roof of the old Uniroyal factory in Passaic, NJ, and our initial investor is the land developer who owns that property.  It's amazing, and so far the girls up there are flourishing.  The hives are facing the Passaic River, where there must be a ton of forage, because over the spring and summer they were working their little wings off bringing in nectar and pollen.

In case we weren't missing enough sleep (Who needs sleep?  Sleep is boring!), we've taken on some new endeavors too!  First of all, Eric has gotten into fine woodworking.  You can see his wares at Blades and Board, and like his Facebook page if you're interested in also seeing his stuff that doesn't get listed for sale.  He's really amazingly talented.  In addition to the stuff on his site and FB page, we had a joint effort... he turned apple wood and walnut ornaments, and I painted them!  We got a ton of custom orders, which was fun but harrowing.  These are a few of the ones we did...

Of course, I couldn't let Eric have all the fun!  I've taken up some new avocations too!  It just so happens that Eric and I made some new friends from whom got these angora buns...

Washburne William, a/k/a "Wash"

Malcolm Lassie, a/k/a "Mal," together with Jack

How freakin' cute are they?... and this drop spindle...

... and what felt about two seconds later, I had this spinning wheel.

She's a 1960-something Ashford Traditional, named Serenity (you nerds will get the connection if you read the buns' names), and I made some more new friends in the process of the purchase!  This was in October, and I've been spinning ever since!  I'm completely addicted.  I even got to spin with some help from Santa when Eric and I were vendors at a holiday festival.

And for Chanukah, Eric got me the best gifts ever.

Those right there are two yarn dyeing books, which I plan to start reading imminently.  I'm really looking forward to putting the one on the left to good use right away, and the one on the right, which is about creating natural dyes, to good use come spring when things start blooming.  Apparently tickseed makes an amazing red-orange that Eric is really looking forward to.

In the middle is King Gumdrop, an out-of-print antique book (1916) I had as a kid, which has old candy recipes in the back!  And that little thing there is a remote shutter control for my DSLR.  Expect some amazing photos of the bees come spring!

Meanwhile, I think in the not too distant future, there will be yarn for sale!

In other happy news...

The new queens in both the Swarm and Fish hives are doing their job!  We saw larvae and capped brood (pupae) in both!  Go girls!  Go girls!  Go girls!  And we saw the Swarm queen, but unfortunately I was too slow to get a photo.  But larvae!  Pupae!

The Fish hive was stronger, but since the Swarm population was so small, we took two full frames of capped brood (pupae) from two of the new hives to add to the Swarm.  Once those hatch out, they'll be nurse bees to the queen's eggs and larvae, then guards, and then in a few days ready to forage and help bulk up the hive's population.

We're Farmers?

Eric tells me that as a kid, he actually dreamed of being a farmer.  I didn't.  He went to an agricultural high school in New York City.  I went to public school, started undergrad as a bio major, and finished as a politics major on my way to law school.  Agriculture never even crossed my mind as being within the realm of anything I wanted to do.

Silly me.

'Cause somehow Eric and I have become farmers.  Weird.

Wednesday evening after work, we decided that it was time to pull some honey supers from the hives.  OK, so we're not experienced or bright farmers.  The bees are less than thrilled in the evening, you see, even just before dusk.  All of the girls are home, all of the foragers are back from foraging, and they're not so keen on dim light or humans (read:  potential threats) breaking into their homes at that hour.  They're never keen on humans stealing their honey, but very much so not at dusk or just before.

So, yeah, not bright.  And I deserved the message I got from the Pooh hive, via a sting in the tush, right through my jeans.  I did, I know it.  And it was fine; because it was through my jeans, she didn't get me badly, just enough to feel the pinch and then itch for a couple days.  Of course, that didn't stop me from calling to Eric, "Smoke my butt!  Smoke my butt!" because when bees sting they release a "danger" pheromone that calls other bees to join in the defense of the hive.  The smoke blocks those pheromones.  All very logical, and in hindsight, funny as all get out, but I'm still glad our neighbors are far enough away that they didn't hear "Smoke my butt!  Smoke my butt!"

Because I'm sure we would have been getting some pretty sketchy looks in the neighborhood.

Eventually we got one (ten frames) of the two honey supers off the Pooh hive, and the one super (six frames) off the Wonderland hive.  And we brought them downstairs to our nifty brand new Kelley Bees extractor we got (which is actually pretty old and we bought used from a fellow beek, perfect for our first year!).

It's a manual, three-frame extractor, and we're definitely getting our exercise!  Turning the handle had me quoting the witches from Macbeth.

Double, double, toill and trouble

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  First, we had to uncap the wax off the honey.

To do so, we used our nifty new uncapping knife.  It's heated and does a great job slicing the caps off.  Turned out I was better at it than Eric, so we figured out quickly how to divide our labor, with Eric holding the frame steady while I sliced.  It smelled so good as the honey was exposed, you have no idea!

From there, the frames went into the triangular metal basket in the extractor, and we started spinning.

The centrifugal force causes the honey to be flung from the cells of honeycomb onto the wall of the extractor and drop down from there, where it's poured through a coarse strainer (to get out any large wax and bee particles but leave the beneficial pollen) into a bucket.

And then?  We bottled our first 18 lbs of honey!!!  There's a bunch more yet to be bottled, and ten more frames we got off the Pooh hive on Sunday to be extracted, and we still need labels, but bottled honey!!!

I'll take the farmer's life.  I love it.

These Go to Eleven

So... our apiary just expanded to nearly double what it was today.  If you're counting along, we started with two hives last spring, one of which died.  So we came into this spring with one hive, which we split.  We then bought three nucs, making five hives.  And Eric caught a swarm, making six.

And now?  They go to eleven.

Another local beekeeper has chosen to downsize his apiary from two locations to one, and was selling his hives.  Someone else bought six, we got five.  Five new (old, established) hives.  All at once.  Whoa!

Two went to the yard of friends, who are hosting them for us.  The funny thing is that the wife said yes, and then forgot to tell her husband!  Thankfully, he's got a good sense of humor and is really laid back, because he accepted the concept immediately, even saying, "this will be fun."  When we got there today, he'd dug up a bit of his lawn to make it flat to accommodate the hives, and spread mulch in front of them so his landscapers don't have to mow that area.  Perfect possible host for our girls!

The other three were planned for another yard in our town, but the logistics there didn't work out, so they're currently, temporarily, living in our yard until they can be moved, which should happen pretty shortly, since we've got a potential "forever home" for them already.

Yeah, I think we're real beekeepers now, just in case I had any residual doubts.

We're getting some honey this year... but just wait 'til next year's crop!

Busy, Busy... as a Bee

On Friday, we inspected our two queenless hives, to find that they'd both been unsuccessful in making viable, mated queens.  Sigh.  We had such high hopes, especially for the Fish Hive.  It's been raining a lot, so it's highly likely that any new queens that hatched were unable to mate or simply unable to get back to the hives.  It's a precarious thing, going on a mating flight.  She could get caught in the rain, eaten by a bird, or any number of other mishaps might befall her.

Sorry, no photos, we were moving quickly to check them out after my half day at the office.

So we headed on up to Hudson Valley Bee Supply on Saturday morning (yes, the 4th, but it's become evident that there are no holidays when you're dealing with agricultural concerns), where we picked up two new mated queens and their attendants, together with just about everything we'd need to extract honey.  Except the extractor.

But then Saturday evening, after I face painted at a country club July 4 party, a beekeeper friend let us know he'd ordered a new extractor and was selling his old one... so we went over there and bought it!  We are now the proud owners of a three-frame Kelley Bees extractor, unlike any of the ones currently on their site, but I suppose the predecessor to this one.  We're so excited!  Now the biggest problem (aside from the fact that we still need to order jars and design/order labels) is waiting for the bees to be done making their honey!

We're not patient types.

I guess it's ok, though.  Where we are, the echinacea, black-eyed Susans, daisies, butterfly bushes, and balloon flowers are just starting to bloom, and we still have a bunch of our fruits and veggies flowering - zucchini, cantaloupe (although if you watch Alton Brown's Good Eats, what we're really growing is apparently muskmelon, no matter what the label says), tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, etc., so if the nectar from those blooms all get added into our honey, that's just fine with us!

In the meantime, I've been knitting my little heart out.  This photo shows the bee blanket as it stood a few days ago; at this point, I've got the second motif (with hearts and another row of dots) completely finished, and I've started in on the third motif, the big bunnies and bee.

Besides that, I got my ceramic bee bowl back from firing!  I think it came out really cute, and find it amazing that this...

... became this.

She Got Me

Yesterday afternoon, although it was still grey and cloudy, it finally stopped raining, so we decided to take a look into the honey supers on the Wonderland and Pooh hives to see if they needed any more space.  Turns out they didn't, but they're doing well with the space they've got.

But I got my first sting in 35 years, my first sting since becoming a beekeeper.  Totally my fault, too.

I was dressed in a dark, short-sleeved shirt and nice pants, and I wasn't in the mood to take part in going into the hives, as I'd just gotten back from a 3-hour face painting gig, so I was across the yard while Eric donned his gear to take a look.

Well, me being me, I got curious and wanted to see too, so I got closer and closer.  Eric took the top super off the Pooh hive, put it on the ground, and was looking at honey frames in the second super, as I got closer to have a look at the top super, which was now uncovered, wide open, on the ground.  I stood right next to it, leaning over to look in from the top, for all intents and purposes, looking to the bees like a big ol' looming bear about to attack (to a bee, dark clothes a human looks like a potential bear, and therefore a huge threat) their indefensible hive.

Whoops.

I felt her land in the crook of my elbow, realized I'd scared them, and immediately walked away from the hives, not freaking out (kudos to me!) not swatting at her, trying to shake my arm to shake her off, but it was already too late.  I felt the pinch as she stung me, and immediately scraped out the stinger, which is what you want to do if you're ever stung, FYI.  It was weird, then.  I felt a gradual, but quick heat start to build, and I knew it was going to hurt.  Not deathly, not intolerably, but it definitely hurt.  I got an ice pack from the freezer, which immediately numbed the pain, and kept it on until the pain subsided on its own.

Later last night, while I was knitting, I was fine.  Every time I straightened my elbow all the way, it felt sore, but not bad.  That's mostly gone now.  What I'm left with is a crazy amount of itching, that's driving me a tad insane, but I'll live.  And for the record, that Benadryl topical anti-itch stuff?  It's useless.  Just so you know.

I'm actually glad it happened.  I'm sorry I scared them, and I'm sorry one of the girls felt the need to go kamikaze, but I'm glad I got stung.  It's good to know that it hurts no more than I remember it hurting 35 years ago, and I've proven to myself that I can handle it fine.  So I'm good!

The Rockstar of Beekeeping

Friday was "Bee Day" for us, from beginning to end.

It started with the biggest event, a visit from NJ's Rock Star of Beekeeping, our state apiarist, Tim Schuler.  He's an amazing beekeeper (Eric called him the Bee Whisperer), incredibly knowledgeable, very matter-of-fact, and funny besides.  Definitely someone to emulate.

He and another incredibly experienced member of our Bee Association, probably the best we've got, John Gaut, showed up around 11 a.m. to inspect the three hives in our yard, a service of indescribable value.

Tim chose to start with the Wonderland Hive, which we told him was an early spring split we'd made from the Pooh Hive and a queen from Hudson Valley Bee Supply.

You'll note that Tim works with nothing other than his smoker and glasses - short sleeves, no veil.  I will admit that I was silly and went veil-and-jacket-free that day, but I was taking photos.  (Though you'll see in the videos just how close I get to the bees to get those photos!  No fear!)  I still can't touch 'em, though.  Not yet.  Eric, on the other hand, held his first frame of bees without wearing gloves!

Nice job, E!

Meanwhile, Tim confirmed that the Wonderland hive was doing great and everything looked as it should.  Awesome!  He spotted the queen off to the side (you'll see her in the video if you look closely at where Tim points; she's on the frame that Tim handed to Eric.  I didn't get a separate photo, but she's the extra long one that's a mahogany color and without striping), and thought she looked great.  While in that hive, we got to taste some of our own honey.  Whoa, it's good!  It made me really excited for the club's honey competition in September.

Odd thing, during this inspection (you'll see during the video), John noticed a queen bee on the ground where she shouldn't be.  She wasn't one of ours, and she was behaving like she wanted to mate.  I ran and got a queen cage we had, and John put her on in.

Then we moved onto the Fish Hive, which we already knew from last week was queenless but had capped queen cells.  The cells were still there, still capped, and there were a few more of them too.  The girls were working hard to make themselves queen-right!

Tim confirmed that they had a good population and would likely soon be back on track, and that we'd done the right thing in taking a frame with a capped queen cell over to the queenless swarm hive for them to raise.  He doesn't even think, because of the number of emerging bees in the Fish Hive and capped brood still to emerge, that the population will diminish by the time the new reigning queen is ready to start laying!

The worst part?  He doesn't want us to check the Fish Hive or Swarm Hive until July 4 for eggs and larvae!  Gah!

As an aside, Tim called attention to the awesome waggle dance a bunch of our girls were doing on their front porch, to call their sisters back home.  I've circled a few for you.  See those tushes up in the air?  They were vibrating around like crazy.

We were trying to figure out what was best to do with the queen John found, unmated and without a colony, and Tim commented that he needs video of worker bees not accepting a queen, balling up on her instead of trying to groom and feed her.  So between the GoPro and my camera, we tried to get that footage while inspecting the Pooh Hive.  Didn't work.  Our girls must not have seen her as any sort of threat, as instead of balling up on her, they completely ignored her and even moved away to avoid her.

Something was obviously wrong with her, and Tim said, with all his vast experience, he'd never seen anything like it!  Which, although he didn't get the video he needed, is still pretty nifty.

In the meantime, we got to see, for the very first time ever, a drone pupa.  It's very rare to see pupae, since the brood gets capped over as larvae and then emerges as adult bees; the pupal stage is the one you never see unless you break open a cell or one happens to break, which is what happened here.  He must have been in some burr comb (the comb sometimes built by the workers between levels where the queen occasionally lays drone eggs) that broke when we took the hive apart for the inspection.  Out of that came this awesome photo of a creature that looks more like an alien than an insect.

At any rate, the Pooh hive is bursting at the seams with bees, brood, and honey.

In fact, we saw some of our girls sharing some of that honey with each other.  So cool!

We also saw several of the new bees emerge!  How awesome are they?!

They're so cute, and when they're first out, they stagger around like little colts trying to find their legs... and some honey to eat.

Our queen is amazing, as is the work they're doing.  In fact, we were exceptionally proud when Tim pulled a frame from one of the honey supers and told us that if we were inclined to save it and enter it, it could be a winner at the Sussex County Fair!  Whoa!  So not only is our honey delicious, our girls make beautiful, beautiful frames of it.

After they'd left, we reveled in our success for a bit before heading to a meeting with a director at a local organization who's interested in having one of our hives on their grounds and having us teach their students about bees!  We loved her, and were very happy that she's very excited about it; now she just has to discuss it with the board.  Fingers crossed that they love the idea as much as she and we do!

If they do, you'll be hearing a lot more about it in the future, for sure.

After that, we went to buy yarn for this blanket that Eric wants me to knit.  It'll mean learning four new techniques, but for this blanket, with a big ol' bee as the centerpiece, it's totally worth it!  Plus, I like to learn and want to expand my knitting repertoire anyway.

Eric and I chose a gold yarn somewhere between butter and mustard for the background color and a beautiful dark maroon for the design.  It'll go beautifully with our living room rug, pillows, accent wall, and the dining room chair upholstery.  I'm starting it tonight!

From there, we brought hive boxes to Mahwah, where our two new nucs are spending time until they can come home to our neighbor's yard in Franklin Lakes, and we installed them there into our hives until they can be moved.  That should be July 4 weekend.

While we were in Mahwah, I got a call from a woman who found us on the NJ Swarm Removal List.  I was so happy that she found us and called us before immediately going for an exterminator, but I found when I had her text me a photo of her "honeybees" that they were unfortunately really yellowjackets and required an exterminator.  Ick!

We were sad not to have another swarm to catch, but to be honest, I was relieved at the time we gained back in not chasing it down.  That evening was the monthly Northeast NJ Beekeepers Association meeting, and we were dying to go, especially since Tim was this month's speaker.

He discussed the inspections he'd made over the two days that he was here in northeast NJ, and then focused on mite treatments, as the time for that is coming right after the harvest in July.  These days, as he's adamant, mite treatments are imperative for the life and well-being of bees.  A survey of the past year's experiences of beekeepers across the country showed that untreated hives had a 76% death rate, which is just outright frightening.

So... first the honey, then preparations to treat and help our girls fight their parasitic tormentors.