A Glossary of Sorts

It's come to my attention that I'm, well, not really speaking English anymore.  I've gotten so immersed in bee culture that I forget not everyone knows the lingo.  So here's some, and I'll be adding more as I think to:

A nuc is a nucleus colony of bees, consisting of 4-5 frames (the ones we bought were five-frame nucs) of drawn honeycomb, a couple thousand worker bees, maybe a few drones, and one mated, laying queen. It's like a mini-colony.

You put that into a new hive (the structure), which they then make home and build out into what you hope becomes a strong, full-sized colony.

Colony, by the way, is the group/family of bees living in one hive.

So we've got three colonies in three hives: Winnie the Pooh, Fish, and Wonderland.

 People use different size boxes for the brood boxes & honey supers. What we've chosen is to use "deeps" for brood boxes, which is where the bees really live & the queen lays all her eggs. They make & store honey there too, but that honey is left for them to eat. It's also where they store nectar & pollen, and care for the eggs/larvae/pupae and do most of their work inside the hive.

We use "mediums" (a few inches shallower than deeps - 3 mediums ends up the same height as 2 deeps) as honey supers. Once the deeps are filled out, the supers go on top for the bees to fill with just honey, and that's the honey we can take for us to use, eat, and sell. Some people use "shallows" (2" shallower than mediums) for their hives, but we don't bother. It's a matter of what you're comfortable lifting when they're full.

To harvest, we'll be borrowing or buying an extractor. The frames of honey-filled comb are put in after slicing off the beeswax caps from the comb (when the honey is ready, the bees cap it over with wax to keep it stored), and slowly spun so the centrifugal force removes the honey. Then it's put through a sieve or cheesecloth to get out any bits you don't want (we'll be using one that's not TOO tightly woven so it doesn't remove pollen) and jarred.

There you go!

Abdication or Assassination?

When last we checked in with the Pooh hive, almost exactly a month ago, things were looking good.  Last weekend when we did our inspection, we thought things looked good then too.  In fact, more experienced beekeepers told us so.

We primarily checked the "new" frames - the ones that were ours, clean, and didn't come with the nuc - during that inspection, and we saw them building out a bunch of comb and filling it with pollen.  As one beekeeper pointed out, pollen is bee baby food, so things were looking pretty good.

And then we looked again this past Monday, Memorial Day.  First, a note that makes me proud of myself.  My brother-in-law was over, so I lent him my gear to wear for the inspection, while I stood just a foot or two away in jeans and a t-shirt, taking photos of the open hive.  Bees buzzing all around me, and I barely noticed.  I'm a beekeeper!

But back to the hive.  We checked the nuc frames for the first time in about two weeks, which is normal, but we didn't like what we saw.

Lots of larvae of varying stages and some capped brood too, but see  how spotty it is?  Kind of like a shotgun effect?  Yeah, that's not right.  It's supposed to be more clustered.  And we didn't see eggs, which isn't good.

Here's a couple of closeups for the curious.

Of course, the first move was to post these photos to our beekeeping group's Facebook forum and get some feedback.  As new beeks, we're not relying solely on our own shaky knowledge.  And the best thing about being a beek is the font of knowledge others are willing to share.

We got some varying opinions - some said we were queenless, some said we had a weak queen.  One said it looked like chalkbrood (it's not) and another that it looked like 100% drone comb and that we'd been sans queen for a long time and things were dire (it's not drone comb and things aren't so dire).  The key is to weed through the varying opinions and information and figure out who to trust.

We did that, and realized we've got a weak or defunct queen.  Not sure which.  I picked up a new queen after work today, and an experienced beekeeper came over to try & find our queen.  When re-queening a hive, the best thing to do is to kill the old queen.  Oddly, though with any other insect I wouldn't think twice about stomping it, the idea of killing our own queen, one of OUR girls, bothered me.  I didn't need to worry.  Yet.  Our experienced beek examined the hive three times and couldn't find her.

So the new queen went in still in her cage, and we're hoping that there's no old queen.  If that's the case, the workers will have time to acclimate to the new girl while she hangs out in her cage.  Tomorrow we need to check again for the old queen.  If we still can't find her, we have to hope she's simply not there anymore.  If we can, an assassination is in order to make room for the new.  Either way, in a few days we have to hope that the girls have worked the new queen out of her cage and accepted her.  If they don't, they'll simply kill her and we'll have to try again.

Wish us luck!

Ready for our New Tenants

Bees!  Yeah, you read that right, real, honest-to-goodness bees.  Specifically, honeybees.  If you knew me in person, you'd know how huge this is.  I'm not generally a fan of anything with more than 5 legs.  Six legs... not a fan.  Six legs and wings... really not a fan.  Six legs, wings, and a stinger... well, I'm sure you get the point.

So this started with Eric, of course.  He's the daredevil in the family.  I've lived nearly 43 years happily mostly avoiding bees together with pretty much every other insect.  I'm not nervous about bees specifically; I've only ever been stung once and I don't remember it hurting all that much.  Plus, I know it was my own fault to an extent.  I scratched an itch without looking and it happened to be caused by a bee walking up my arm, which of course thought I was attacking.  Reasonable.

Eric, while he hasn't got my aversion to insects in general, has been scared of bees since he was a kid and stung repeatedly when a bumblebee hive funneled its way into his bedroom.  And he hates being scared of anything.  So it occurred to him that a good way to get over the fear would be to own bees.  That's my Eric.

He did a little reading, and what he read convinced me too.  Did you know that there's a honeybee shortage in the world these days?  Apparently, in China the bee population has been so decimated that humans are being employed - at a pittance, of course - to hand-pollinate the farms with little paintbrushes.  And the honeybee populations here in the states are dangerously low too.  Whole Foods released a picture of what its produce section would look like sans bees.  It wasn't pretty.  It was pretty empty, in fact.

The upshot is that we as a species, as a world, need bees.

Add to that the more selfish idea that we could have our own fresh, natural honey to eat, with which to bake, to sell, and to make our soaps and other honey-laden products.  And on top of that, there's the beeswax, perfect for our lip balms and candles.  And mead, since we both know Eric would be making mead from some of it.

The next thing I knew, he'd signed up for the Northeast NJ Beekeeper's Association, went to visit hives with a local beekeeper, and bought a book on beekeeping.  And nearly immediately after that, we both owned beekeeping gear.

How cute am I?

I've already used the gear too.  Check me out holding a frame full of bees!

I rock, I tell ya.

In addition to gear, Eric bought all the bits an pieces to put together a hive.  He put it all together, I primed and painted, and then we brainstormed so I could have some fun with it.  It wasn't hard to settle on a Winnie the Pooh theme.  So I painted some more.

As of yesterday morning, the whole hive was finished, sealed, and set up, ready for bees!  And since I've been asked by others, yes, although I obviously copied the characters, I did draw them freehand.  It's good to know I've still got my abilities.

We're hoping to still get some this season, though it's late in the year.  If we do, the bees will have to be left to produce whatever honey they can for their own survival, and we'll have to feed them over the winter.  We've already got the food for 'em.  Now we're just waiting for a viable "nuc" (nucleus hive of bees) to be ready for the move to our hive!

Fingers crossed that we get 'em soon.  And then?  We get a kid-sized suit for the nephews & kids' friends to come learn about bees!

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Just in time for the Summer Solstice Sale!

Thieves' Oil Lip Balm has come to the HAFshop.

Thieves' Oil, the mix of spices and perfumes that kept those now infamous rascals from contracting the bubonic plague as they ransacked houses, is the same mix of essential oils we use in this lip balm, together with beeswax, cocoa and shea butters, vitamin E, and other moisturizing oils.

Steal a kiss!

And more news... we're phasing in our new lip balm containers.  So far you can buy Orange You Glad I'm Your Honey Lip Balm, our awesome mix of orange essential oil, honey, shea & cocoa butters, vitamin E, and other moisturizing oils, in the new containers, both at Reef Botanicals and in the HAFshop.

We've heard our customers' request for the lipstick style container, and we've responded.  Enjoy!