Adventures in beekeeping, mushroom farming, chicken keeping, honey production, maple tapping, soap & candle making, drawing, crafting, sewing, knitting, baking, raising pets, and living life.
We are the husband and wife team who run Reef Botanicals and handmake every batch of soap, every candle, and every other item we sell. We look forward to hearing from you!
Actually, the problem is that we've been really, really busy.
We had our honey harvest back in July, and then had to bottle and label it all, because we were almost immediately sold out. It was crazy!
We did save a bunch for ourselves for the year, and there's a it more almost honey to extract to make mead.
But of course, because one of the season's big things was nearly over, we had to take on another.
Chickens!
First came the coop and run, so they'd have somewhere to live.
Eric built it, with some help from his brother and our friend. I helped stain some of it and pitched roof shingles up to Eric to fasten down. He's pretty proud of it, and rightly so, as he did it with pretty much no plans and just a bunch of research. The run is 6' x 12', and the coop is that closed area raised up on the right. He made the ramp for them, and the nesting boxes are sticking out on the right.
And then, because their feed and supplies needed a place to reside, a storage bench to match!
Yes, he made this too. My only lament is that it's a custom piece, so it's too long and wide for commercial cushions. Since I'd like it to have a cushion, I'll have to make one.
After the bench, he finally made the compost bin he's been talking about!
Yep, that matches too! He did a great job; the top folds in half to throw in food and yard wast, or lifts off completely. And there's another hinged door on the bottom to shovel out compost. I'm a little obsessed with bringing out every possible bit of compost for the bin. I just love the feeling of "garbage" not actually going to waste.
And then, since there was wood left over, he made a matching snack table for next to the bench.
And then the finishing touch... ferns!
Conor is obviously very interested in the girls, both boys are. But I haven't introduced the girls yet! We got six hens, all pullets, so they're not laying yet. Hopefully very soon!
Miranda is our buff orpington, and will be largest, fluffiest of the birds.
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!
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.
So... rather than "good news first" or "bad news first," I'll do this in chronological order, since the ups and downs are too intertwined and affect each other.
On Saturday, after I face painted and did glitter tattoos from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., we headed over to the swarm hive to see how the girls were doing.
Queenless. Damnit.
A bunch of comb they'd built, some nectar and/or sugar water in the cells, no brood... no eggs, no larvae, no pupae. And one empty queen cup. Queenless. And without a queen, a colony just can't survive. Bees only live a month and a half on the outside, so without a queen replenishing the population to the tune of 1,000 - 1,500 eggs daily, the colony just dies out.
Crud.
Eric spent some of Saturday evening trying to reach anyone from whom we could purchase a mated queen, but had no luck. So we discussed taking a frame of brood from one of our three backyard hives, which would hopefully have eggs on it (I really wish I could see eggs, but damn these 44-year-old eyes, I can't), giving the swarm the opportunity to move an egg into the queen cup they'd built and raise a new queen. When bees are queenless, they'll do this, but they need to have eggs under 3 days old available to do this. Since there were no eggs in the swarm hive, they had nothing to work with. Giving them another hive's eggs would give them a chance, though this takes a while. It takes about a month for an egg to become larva, then pupa, then queen, then mate, then start laying. And it was a small population to start. So you see the problem.
Well, Sunday we inspected our backyard hives. The Pooh hive is doing so well that the first honey super is full and nearly capped, the second is getting filled, and we added a third! Yay for a buncha honey!
And look! I got a photo of eggs! See those white lines in the cells toward the top left quadrant of the photo? Eggs!
The Wonderland hive is also doing very well, and we added a second honey super.
The Fish hive, though... ah, the Fish hive.
Queenless. Yikes! Two of four. Sigh.
But... the good news in this (yes, really, there's good news) is that the Fish hive population is good, and they're hard workers. They'd already built several queen cups to replace their missing queen, and they were all capped. That is the real good news, because capped queen cells mean queen pupae, the very next stage before adult bees! That cuts down the time until they can mate and start laying tremendously!
So... we raced one of the frames with a capped queen cell over to the swarm hive, removed an undrawn frame, and dropped in the one with the potential queen. Our hope - fingers crossed! - is that the swarm takes care of her and the other brood on that frame, buying themselves some time, and she emerges, mates well, and gets to work.
The bad part is we have to leave them alone for 2 weeks while this all happens! So fingers are also crossed for good weather on the weekend of June 27-28 so we can take a look and see how they're doing.
Meanwhile, we're trust the Fish hive to right itself. We gave them the undrawn foundation from the swarm to work on, and there are a few capped queen cells in that hive, or were on Sunday, and with the other two hives neighboring it, lots of drones are available for mating.
Again, we're supposed to leave those girls alone for a couple weeks too, which you know drives me absolutely batty, but we may be going in on Friday. The NJ State Apiarist, Tim Schuler, will be coming to inspect our three backyard hives and give us feedback (We're so excited!), so it's his call on what whether we can go in and see how the Fish girls are doing.
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.
Checked out our girls again today, again with happy results, mostly.
The Pooh hive is doing really, really well, building out honeycomb to the outer frames of foundation, but they haven't touched the honey super yet. We really hope they notice it soon and start building! Without honeycomb to fill... no honey in them!
Then, the Fish hive, which is also doing amazingly well, so well and so quickly that we added a honey super there too! Fingers crossed!
The Wonderland hive is also doing well, but I have to apologize, because I'm a twit. I forgot to charge the camera battery, and it died at the very beginning of the inspection. Sorry 'bout that. But they've got about 60% of the frames of their second brood box built out with honeycomb, and the brood looks good. Not bad, since they consisted of just 4 built-out frames when we split them off from the Pooh hive, and considering the fact that we worried about them swarming and/or losing their queen.
So nice to have an uneventful inspection with the girls not finding a way to scare us!
Another hive inspection yesterday, and we are so happy! We didn't go far into hives when we didn't have to, but we saw what we needed to see.
First, the Pooh Hive.
Our girls have the second brood box almost completely drawn and a few are up in the honey super. It's not drawn at all yet, but we having a feeling that's coming very soon.
Next, the Fish Hive. Unfortunately, this video is a bit blurry, and for that, I apologize.
This is the nuc we got this year, and it's growing really quickly. We might actually get honey out of this hive this summer!
Last, Wonderland Hive.
This is the split we took from the Pooh hive, which last week we were afraid were going to swarm. They didn't but all the queen cups and swarm cells are gone - the girls removed them and hung around, drawing out the comb instead. Plus, we found young larvae, so we've got a queen!
After our inspections, we spent some time chatting with our neighbors across the street, and found out that the husband used to keep bees too! They hadn't realized we were keeping bees, but were really excited. They've got an amazing garden in their yard, with fruit trees, a huge vegetable garden, roses, basil, mint, and all sorts of other herbs and flowers.
Apparently, the other day, their son was over and noticed a ton of honeybees on the apple tree. He commented about it to his dad, who insisted that they hadn't seen honeybees in years, and that it had to be bumblebees. The son insisted no, it was honeybees, and now they figure it was our bees! That's both sad and wonderful. Wonderful that they're seeing our bees, and that our girls are getting their sustenance, and without pesticides there, as they don't spray. Sad, as they hadn't seen honeybees in many years, which is just evidence of the frightening decline of the population.
Well, after the ice hit, I was terrified that all the bees were dead. The next morning, I went out back and the entire front entrance was iced over, so I cleared it, and saw what looked like a sea of dead bees just inside the entrance & extending back. We were really scared that they'd all died of starvation (the most common cause of colony decimation this time of year) or lack of ventilation when the entrance was covered, because they cannot have moisture. Moisture is a much bigger bee-killer than the cold.
Happy surprise! Yesterday when it got to 42F, although it was really overcast & even drizzling, we went into the hive to check on them. Eric was smart & wore his veil. I was a doofus and thought I wouldn't need veil or gloves. Plus, I was in my big black winter coat, and they hate dark colors - they think you're a bear attacking. My mistake.
We brought out what we have left of fondant and pollen patty for them, in case they needed it.
Took off the outer & inner cover, and there were a ton of them! And they were ANNOYED. They don't like being chilly and they don't like when it's not sunny, and they wanted us OUT.
We managed to get the inner cover back on & Eric snapped a photo through the hole before we closed it back up entirely (turns out they still had a bunch of fondant, meaning they'd had enough honey stores, so we didn't need to feed them yet), but unfortunately, they wouldn't let us photograph them with the inner cover off.
Still... so happy to see they're still there & OK! In fact, Eric is working from home today (it's 52F & sunny) and says that the girls are going crazy in the warmth and sun. Hundreds of the bees are flying, maybe more. Did I mention how happy I am? I'm just jealous I'm not home to see it!
Gonna buy more fondant and see if we can't feed them later this week. Better to give them more than they need than let them starve. It'd suck if they made it through winter ok & then died this late in the game.
So today we got to do our first inspection since releasing the queen into the hive. I was so stressed out that I had a nightmare last night that all I saw flying in our yard were drones and the hive itself was being robbed.
[All drones is bad; you need the vast majority of a colony's population to be worker bees. The drones are the males and only useful when a virgin queen needs to mate. Robbing occurs when foreign bees or wasps smell the hive's honey and race in en force to steal it. The hive's bees will fight the invaders to the death, leaving your colony very weak if you don't or can't move fast to help them.]
That didn't happen. We did see a bunch of drone comb (capped cells that were shaped very bulbously, rather than flatish), which initially concerned us. Until we got to frame 6.
On the 6th frame, we saw a lot of open cells filled with liquid, which Eric initially thought was honey.
And then he spotted her.
The queen! She's honestly easy to spot right now, as most of our bees are still the original dark ones, and she's so light, we don't even need the green dot on her back yet. But as her brood hatches, and their coloration will be more like hers, she'll be a little tougher, even though you can see the difference here. She's much bigger than the workers, with no striping, and a very elongated abdomen. That abdomen is like that because that's where she stores her eggs and the sperm from her bout of mating, whereas workers don't have the same needs.
What you're seeing happening here is that the workers surrounding her are attending to her and grooming her. This is great behavior to see, especially since it's obvious they've taken to their new queen. The biggest indicator of that is that she's alive. But it's nice, for me, to see them caring for her as they should, since those are our original bees doing it, not her own brood.
So... what we initially thought was nothing more than honey, I'm now speculating is actually a frame full of royal jelly with eggs floating in it. At least we hope so! It seems reasonable, and eggs are really tiny and hard to see. Next week will be the real telltale time, because by then we should see larvae and maybe even pupae.
After nearly a week of waiting, on Sunday we were finally able to go back into our newly-occupied hive and see how it was doing. Apparently, everyone's healthy. We saw that they were doing a good job drawing new honeycomb out on the blank frames.
Plus, there was lots of brood... cells with eggs, larvae & pupae.
And there was a ton of capped honey for the bees t eat too! And some pollen-filled cells in an awesome bright orange. We saw a few bees coming home with legs covered in orange pollen too. It was amazing.
We gave them a bucket of sugar syrup to eat to help with their comb building, and left them to their work. While I worked on some other stuff, Eric planted our new honeysuckle for them.
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