Sugared Bees

I mentioned last time that fall is almost upon us - leaves are starting to drift off the trees and waft down around our boots, the air is just slightly crisp, the sky a touch bluer. When you sit out on the porch swing you hear the familiar *thump* of apples falling to the ground. Pumpkins are starting to show up everywhere you look, especially in my chai lattes.

This means a lot for me and you. Usually in fall, although deer season has already started and James sightings are scarce, we tend to venture out into the distilleries, wineries, fall festivals, and markets more. I'll be completely honest. I just like fall. I am totally prejudiced. And I am not even sorry, Summer.

Fall also means something for our little bumbles, too! They are packing up and waiting for winter. We had already harvested a few pounds of honey, but still stinging (pun absolutely intended) from last winter's loss, left most of the honey intact in hops to sustain our hive.

We went out to check on them this past weekend and they. were. buzzing. Our goal this visit was to check for hive mites (like bee fleas or ticks) and make sure they look stocked up enough to make it through the winter. They are still working on gathering pollen, and we saw some bees loaded down with pollen packed into their baskets. The bee's pollen baskets are on their back legs - and when they are that full they remind me of tiny little body builders with gross-weird bulgy legs.

The hive was moderately full of honey, but we will still need to supplement them over the season with sugar water and pollen patties. We'll worry about that later though. What we really wanted to do is see how badly stricken our bees were with mites.

So, one by one we pulled out frames and scanned for honey, baby bee cells, and mites. What's great about this is that in order to treat for the mites, you sprinkle the bees with powder sugar. Can you imagine? That's the equivalent of ice cream falling from the sky for us! This serves a dual purpose. The bees can't stand being dirty, so they immediately get to work grooming themselves and eachother. In this process they are pulling the mites off of each other and dropping them through the hive and onto the ground, where they die. The mites also have a terrible time trying to stick to the bees when they are coated in the powdered sugar so some of them will fall off on their own.

James and his mom pulled out drone larvae one at a time with tweezers. Which means we needed to comb through every frame of each hive. Which also means that every single bee in there was pissed off at us.

Regardless, the drones were removed which is a good thing for our hive. The mites live in the drone bee cells and that is how they build up their numbers. Unfortunately for the drone bees, they were required to sacrifice their lives for the good of the hive. How very altruistic. In reality, the hive kicks out all drone bees at the beginning of the winter anyways. We all know how much guys can eat and when colony starvation is a very real problem, who needs those extra mouths to feed anyways?

Good news for the boys is - if they make it through the winter, then their milkshake brings all the queens to the yard.

So our bees got sugared, we sacrificed some drones, visually inspected the hives, were chased all the way to the house twice by one particular angry bee, and nobody was stung! I'll write that off as a success.

High End Honey

*Bee* on the lookout for sampler jars, coming soon! Our first harvest is on its way!

How sweet it is!

We got a call over the weekend from James' parents. They had one of our bee expert friends come out and take a look at the hives, and she suggested we go ahead and pull some frames for extracting. Luckily, this lady has her own extractor and she gladly took them to her bee house and taught them how to work it.

Now, it's a little early to be harvesting, but the tools were there and none of us have ever used an extractor so it was great that they had the chance to learn before we get elbow deep in 100 pounds of honey.

Keep in mind... we just put the supers on our hives a few short weeks ago...

So they took the super over to her house, extracted some honey, and now what? I need to order some jars! They pulled over NINE POUNDS of honey from one super on one hive!

Come late August, when the honey is all ready to be gathered, we are expecting some major flows. I'll keep you posted!

Little bees climbing over a frame

Let me know if you would like a sample!

Super Duper honey time

Some of you may be wondering what is going on with the bees - this is Honey and Horseshoes, anyways. Well, throughout the summer, beekeeping is mostly hands-off. We spend most of our time with the bees- just poking around and making sure they are all still in the hives and haven't swarmed off.

We have noticed a huge difference in this year's hives versus last years. The number of bees, alone, is a stark contrast. After we placed last year's colony in the hives we hadn't noticed much of an increase in the number of bees flying around. Now, with our swarm and Georgia bees (the colony that was store-bought, happened to come from Georgia), we have noticed a huge jump in the number of bees and the amount of activity around the hive.

When we pull frames from the hive body to inspect for the queen and baby bees, there are so many workers and nurse bees around that we can barely see the wax foundation.

A swarm bee checking out the painted flower on his hive.

This weekend was the perfect time to place our honey supers. We know our busy bees have established and they don't look like they are going anywhere, so to keep them happy we are putting the honey supers on top of the hive body boxes.

The honey supers give the bees room to store just honey. We place what is called a queen excluder between the hive bodies and the supers. This keeps her down below in the regular frames and will prevent her from laying eggs in the top boxes, thus making them only honey. In a few weeks we will add another honey super - making our hive four boxes tall. We could probably add a third super, as well, if our bees are able to keep producing honey with a late fall bloom.

The prospect of harvesting a solid 50-100 pounds of honey is very real this year. And that is taking into account the super or two we will leave on the hive for the bees to eat all winter. Place your orders now!

A swarm of wild stingers, part two

Glad you stayed posted. I know you are anxious to hear about what to do if you ever encounter a giant thriving swarm of wild honeybees.

As I said, our names were on the list. When James' mom got the call, she had to move quick! She grabbed our empty hive body and threw it into her trunk and ran out to the farm on which the swarm collector had told her to meet.

Let's take a quick minute to assess the scene... (I know all of this because this particular swarm collector documents every recovery minute by minute).

The two women arrive on the farm and knock on the door of the trailer which resides on this particular farm. They find the man who had called, drunk on whiskey, "trapped" inside his home. Now, I know before I became this involved with my little bee buddies I was hesitant of anything with a stinger, but don't get me wrong, I have never been barricaded inside my home by a bug.

They informed this gentleman that he would soon be relieved of his bees. The woman quickly nailed a few of the frames from our hive, over the swarm, and placed a box around them. These particular bees had swarmed inside a knot in a tree.

Maybe I need to explain a swarm a little better? Think Winnie the Pooh. Swarms are colonies of bees that have just decided they would like to move somewhere else for some reason - lack of food, lack of room, or - dare I say - mutiny? They all group up together and fly off, in search of greener pastures. Swarms can be wild bees or from someone's hive. It doesn't much matter so long as they make honey.

Once the box was placed over the hole in the tree where the swarm was living, she waited. 2 whole hours. When they came back most of the bees had crawled onto the frames. They smell like bee and they have some food and room, so why not?

The finished hive! My glorious paint job.

She quickly grabbed the frames, put them in our hive body, and duct taped it shut.

There you have it. Feel like you could do that? I should mention that James' mom wore her bee suit home, and it is a good thing she did, as some bees had escaped into the cabin of her car. Can you imagine driving down the interstate, peering into the car next to you, and it is a woman in a bee suit?

James moving the frames around and checking for baby bees.

So our swarm is home at last. They have been in the hive almost 3 weeks now, so it looks like they may decide to stay. James and I checked on them the other day and to say they are "busy bees" is an understatement. We were quickly reminded how different the separate lineages of bees can be.

Thats a very serious face.

I took a sting behind the ear and he took one in the finger. I deserved mine and he probably did too... but still. I have been keeping bees for 2 years now and I guess I am finally a legitimate beekeeper. My first sting. Ouch! I tried not to complain too much but now, 6 days later, I still feel like I took a line drive to the side of my head. But at least I didn't swell up and die. And neither did James. And for that, you still have this blog.

A swarm of wild stingers

Oh, yea? You were just wondering what was going on with the bees? Well, good. I have an update for you.

A while back I may have mentioned that we lost not only our first, hard working hive, but that we lost our second, honey-lovin' hippie hive as well. They both succumbed to hunger. So sad. Especially since there was so much honey in the hives. It would be like you or I dyeing of starvation when our fridge is full and in the next room... we just didn't really feel like going that far.

So, while all of this was happening, James' mom decided she would like to be an apiarist as well. She attended bee school of her own accord, went to the annual beekeeper's conference and bought her own hive. Her hive was decorated by a group of school children, and is partly the reason James and I decided to decorate our own hives. We couldn't very well have left our dingy old gray hives out next to her shiny new one!

A swarm bee checking out my painted flower.

She bought herself a nucleus to get her hive started. Already we could tell a difference. Her hive was a hummin and a buzzin from day 1. James and I are both under the assumption that she had more bees in her nuc box than we did in our entire hives, which would add to the starvation issue.

Just a side note: a nuc box is a set of already established frames with bees on them (about 5 frames) that you just drop into your empty hive. They are great starters because the bees don't have to work as hard to build out their comb and start storing. James and I had started last year with just 2 colonies. We know better now.

Luckily... we won't have to be purchasing any nucs or colonies. How's that, you ask? Did a swarm of wild bees just make their way into the neighborhood and pick our nice little hive? Realtors always say a fresh paint job sells a house...

The answer is... well, kinda.

James' mom met someone through her own bee contact who is a swarm collector. You gotta know a guy that knows a guy if ya get what I'm sayin... She reached out to this woman, who collects swarms in her free time, and delivers them free of charge to anyone on her list that is wanting one.

Now swarms are in high demand. Swarms are very ambitious bees looking for a permanent home. There are plenty of beekeepers wanting to get their hands on some of these bees and place them in their empty hives. So she added our names to the list...

Stay tuned for details!

Recap of the Bluegrass Beekeeping Conference

James and I will be the first ones to admit that we were not at all excited about the conference we attended last weekend. We drug our feet until the last day of registration and ended up only signing up because we felt like we owed it to our bees to learn as much as possible about making their lives easier. I mean, we did drag them across the state and shake them into a little box, where we force them to live and make honey, only for us to steal it away from them when they need it most.

We drug ourselves out to Frankfort at 8am for the beginning of the conference. We were in good company. We nibbled donuts and had tea (with honey - of course!) among about 400-500 other beekeepers. We perused the different vendor displays and tables full of honey and bee-related items. We even ran into our old pal, Buddy the Bee man, who taught us everything we knew about bee keeping.

After a while we all gathered for opening comments, led by Dr. Jeff Harris, Ph.D, who is a Apiculture Specialist at Mississippi State University. It was a brief presentation on the importance of honey bees and afterwards we all split up to go to our chosen breakout sessions.

You already know about the sessions I chose to attend - I am all hip to the buzz on different honey and beeswax products, but there were a ton of other selections. James chose to attend all bee management and pest control courses, so practical...

Some of the courses offered included a series of beginner's bee keeping classes, a course of different types of plants to provide forage for your bees, different types of hives, requeening and splitting hives, bee pheromones, beekeeping business courses, swarm prevention, and new technologies for modern beekeepers, among many others. There was so much to learn that there is no way, even with both of us, we would have seen and heard everything in one day.

After the 2 morning sessions we broke for a catered lunch and then attended two more sessions before closing. We learned so much in the day that we had definitely gotten our registration fee's worth of information.

The sessions were all taught by experts in the field. There was even a session on how to present beekeeping presentations to the public, which was led by the National Honey Princess! I didn't have the  opportunity to attend this session but it was right up my alley.

We ended up being pleasantly surprised by the overabundance of information we took away from the conference and all of the nice people we met while we were there. We got to see a little glimpse of other apiaries when we chatted with the other beekeepers. We would talk to someone who had 3 hives, then turn around and talk to someone who had 200. We definitely have a lot more to learn and we won't be dragging our feet to register next year. I am actually looking forward to the next conference! I wonder if they would let me decorate a hive for auction... or present a session on blogging about bees?

Painting the hive

James loved the painted hives that we saw at the Bluegrass Beekeeping School, and the one we liked most was auctioned off for over $300! So, unfortunately, we didn't come home with the new hive, but, it did lead us to spiff up our old one.

When we came back out to the farm the next day James and I set aside some time to clean up our empty hive. We want it to be perfect for our new colony, when they move in later this Spring.

We went ahead and moved it to the porch for cleaning, since we already know how much the neighbor bees get all up in our business when we open up anything bee related. We disposed of all of the deceased inhabitants and inspected the frames for any evidence of disease or pests.

Everything looked good, except we did see a few dead varroa mites in the baseboards. Luckily, James attended a lot of sessions on pest control in the hive at our conference so he is going to take care of them.

So we went ahead and cleaned everything up. We decided to leave the honey frames in the hive and give our new bees a head start, but that didn't keep our other hive from sending in the troops to ravage the stores. Within minutes there were three or four bees checking out our work, and within half an hour there were well over 100 crawling over the honey frames, stocking up. This was fine, since each frame, with honey, weighed well over 5 pounds a piece. There was plenty to go around.

While our bees were doing their robbing, I got to cleaning and painting our hive. James asked me to paint the hive body, so I got busy slathering on some clean white paint. Our hives were originally a greyish color, which was pretty boring.

James asked me to add something to the white base, he wanted a fun design, something like we had seen at the conference.

So, while he was fencing pasture for the cows, I got creative. Here are some pics of a sneak peak of the design so far!

Honey and hops- home brewing bee beer and home made lip balms too!

Hops, in the bag, were home grown by our speaker.

My second session of the day during the convention was about home brewing beer with honey. Since I don't know much about brewing beers it was a little foreign to me, but it was enough to convince me that it is something that I am definitely going to do.

We learned about equipment, measurements, different ingredients and what the outcomes would be. Mmm... Delicious frothy honey beers. The most important thing I took from this session is that different honeys from the variety of different plants that the bees visit influence the taste of the beers. I also learned that you should pair light honeys with light beers and dark with dark beers. The flavors are complimentary and work together to make the best brew possible.

I am absolutely ready to run out an get myself some buckets and bottles and get this basement brewery up and running.

The third session I visited focused on balms, lotions, candles and salves made from honey and beeswax. I learned an awful lot about different herbs and flowers that heal and sooth. I also grabbed a recipe from the speaker for a natural beeswax bug off roll on stick. That's definitely on the list... As well as some peppermint lip balm and an essential oil tincture for when James has his horrendous bouts of poison ivy.

Home made essential oils for addition to balms, lotions and salves.

If it wasn't already obvious, I attended a lot of the honey and hive product courses. James, on the other hand, chose to sit in on the bee management courses. He learned about splitting and requeening new hives. We met up for our last class to learn about pest management, since that seems to be the biggest problem bee keepers face.

Again, I'll be posting more detailed information later this week or next, but for now I just wanted to give a brief play-by-play of how our first experience at a beekeeping convention went.

Savory and sweet- cooking with honey!

One of my breakout sessions today, at the BBConvention was about cooking with honey. It was hosted by Chef Jim Whalen and was a full on cooking demonstration, complete with taste tests (score!).

In the class he showed us how to make a ton of different appetizers and desserts.

Chef Jim Whalen.

We learned how to make honey and almond nougats, an honey bourbon smoked almonds. We also watched as he mixed eggplants, onions, honey, red wine vinegar, basil, and mint with marinara and served it on crustinis. It was delish. I am not a fan of eggplant and this was definitely on my make-at-home list.

The Agridulce.

On a toast triangle! Yum!

We also had some salmon that had been soaked in bourbon, cured in salt and brown sugar, glazed in honey and then smoked. It was served with honey sour cream and mango chutney. Awesome.

The smoked salmon.

Ginger and honey tea.

Then we had some honey and ginger glazed grilled pineapple with red pepper flakes. Amazing. This was definitely my favorite. He recommended serving it warm over froyo.

If only you could smell these....

The honey-almond candies were divine.

In addition to these new dishes he also showed us how he made a honey ginger combination for tea. It was all so yum. I am going to email him this week and get the official recipes and I'll share them here if you want!

The smoked almonds.

Decorated hives!

Here are some snaps of the hives up for auction that have been decorated by local elementary school students. They are PRESH.

How adorable, right? James loves this hive. 

Bees exploding out from a skep!

We will definitely be bidding on one or two. Hey... It goes to a good cause, plus, painting your own hive is a beeya.

Our favorite, the white one with little bees, is in front. I think the second one, the bright orange,
yellow and blue one, would make a great urban-rooftop hive.

Our fav again.

Graffiti bees.

James and I both love the white one with little bees all over it! It looks like each kid drew their own bee, because they are all different. So cute.

2013 Bluegrass Beekeeping Conference in Frankfort, Kentucky

James and I are at the 2013 Bluegrass Beekeeping Conference in Frankfort right now! I'll post a few tid-bits throughout the day then give you a full run down later this week on all of the awesome new things we're learning.

You might think this sounds like a huge boring waste of a Sunday, but maybe you'll reconsider when I show up with a pitcher of honey beer or some honey soy chicken kabobs. That's right... "Cooking with honey" and "brewing with honey" are both on my list of classes today.

So, while I enjoy a lecture on pollination and varroa mites, you can enjoy these adorable pictures of hives painted by different local elementary schools up for auction!

Stay tuned.

Hungry bees are dead bees, starvation wiped out our hive

 I have an update on our bee situation. More good news and bad news, kind of.

The good news is that I have deduced that our bees do not, in fact, have foul brood. This means that we are going to be able to continue using the same hive bodies and frames, and do not have to burn our second, healthy hive.

The bad news is that our bees have starved to death and it is is something that is totally preventable. How can bees starve, you ask? It's tricky. We even placed extra food, in addition to leaving all of their year's honey in the hive. From my research, bees can starve even with plenty of food in the hive if it is not directly accessible to them.

So, James and his dad and I peeked into the dead hive this past weekend and we saw a lot of sadness and destruction. The bees seemed to be frozen in place. This confirms our theory of them actually getting too cold. We started pulling out frames to check them out. They did not have a strong odor, which is typical of foul brood, and the color of the honey comb and brood comb were normal.

The capped cells are full of honey.

We kept looking and found our bees had eaten through the bottom frames of honey, and as they worked their way up, through the honey supers, they ate everything in the middle of the hive. They had even eaten a hole through several frames, working their way to more food.

The hole they had created to move from frame to frame.

The uncapped cells prove they had been eating some of their honey stores.

Our fatal flaw was that we had placed the extra food patties for the hive off to one side. From the information I gathered through multiple bee keepers associations, we were supposed to place the food patty directly over top of their winter huddle.

I find it so perplexing that bees, significantly intelligent, for bugs, would starve to death before the found a huge pile of extra food for themselves, just inches from where they were. There was honeycomb full of their lifesaving food surrounding them on all sides. But from what I read, it would not have mattered.

According to the books and websites I have been reading, this is not uncommon, either. James' mom and dad attended bee school this past fall, to get their own hives started, and they reported back that bee keepers, if they desire to have 6 working hives, should start at least 12. "Following the Bloom", makes the same statement. When you want two hives, start four, when you want 200, start 400. Thus, all bee keepers should expect at least a 50% die-off over the winter from starvation and freezing.

Frozen in place, working in the cells.

Surrounding the hole.

The most disappointing part of our discovery of the dead hive, was finding the thousands of bee bodies piled up on the bottom board. The bees had worked so hard for almost a year and just couldn't make it.

Our entire colony, lost.

We are just very lucky that our second hive was able to access their food patty and all of their honey. Even while we stood to inspect our dead hive, the one next to it buzzed with life. We heard their happy little bee noises from outside the hive, and watched as several bees came out to check on us.

So, come April we will be ordering another nucleus and queen, or splitting our hive if it is strong enough.

Bad news bees

I hate to break this to you... but we have lost a hive. It is devastating news, I know. About three or four weeks ago James had checked on our bees. He held his head up against the hive and heard a lot of buzzing going on and occasionally saw one go in or out through the door. The next week temperatures dropped into the 10s for several days straight and we had quite a bit of wind. Sometime during the storm something must have knocked our hive off balance, even though we keep them surrounded by large round bales to serve as wind breaks during the winter. Two weeks later he checked again.

The hive body was separated by a small crack where the two levels had come apart. The frigid air must have seeped into the hive and, despite our bee's warming themselves in a ball, froze them. What is even worse is that this was our productive hive. We have two different types of bees, we have decided: hippie bees and corporate bees.

The hippie bees are really lazy. They meander around the flowers and do their own thing, they were slow getting their comb started and didn't have hardly any honey built up before the winter. Our corporate bees were on top of it. They were all over the place. They built out all of their comb within weeks and already had a good stock of honey saved up. We are convinced the hippie bees were just going to wait around until winter came then go knock on the other bees' hive and be all like, "Hey, man... can't we all just get along?"

We definitely know our bees froze their little bumble butts off, but there may be another culprit here. James is convinced that we have foulbrood. It is the honey bee hive kiss of death. It is highly contagious and bees easily fall victim to this terrible disease quickly.

Since we used second-hand hives there was no way for us to know for sure that the previous inhabitants weren't infected. The only way to make sure your bees don't get it is to use all new hives. Even then, if one of your bees invades a hive that has been killed off due to foulbrood, and steals the honey, they are bringing it back to the new hive, disease and all.

I am currently reading a book, Following the Bloom, by Douglas Whynott, which I really like. It is the story of a man who took an interest in bee keeping and decided to follow along as a journalist and amateur bee keeper as migratory bee keepers shuffled their hives across the U.S. This book described foulbrood sweeping the nation. It talks of one bee keeper who started the year with over 500 thousand hives, only to come out of the season with less than 200 thousand. That's still a shit ton of bees. But when that is your livelihood, it can be crippling.

Chloe, curled up with my new bee book.

Which leads me to my next point... The only way to make sure that our future bees do not get foulbrood, if our bees did, in fact, have it, is to burn their hives. Hives. Plural. That means burning all of our hippie bees too. In a big bonfire. This makes me very very very unhappy and I don't like even considering it, but it is the only way. We are planning to bring our frames in to the ag. extension to have them looked at and tested for foulbrood. If it is, in fact, the disease, they must be burned. This means that James and I would have to start out fresh - new hives, new frames, new bees, everything, in April.

We'll keep you posted on our hippie bees' fate. Make honey, not war!

Deciding your fate

One of our little workers. Check out those pollen baskets, ladies.
This was taken when he was supervising me, building his new frames.

I am here today to bring you good, and maybe, bad, news. We're back to talking about the bees. Ours are currently freezing their little heineys off in the hive, waiting for the weather to warm up. We have had our usual influx in temperatures here, lately. Some days it is 70, some days it is 7, and last week we had tornados. Typical Kentucky winter.  We are waiting for a solid 3-5 day stretch when then temperature has been above 65 to lift the lids and give them a once-over, but I am told they are making all kinds of happy bee noises that can be heard outside their hives. That's good. At least we know some of them are alive, right?

Well, over the weekend I got on the topic of bees and someone was asking me about stings. I told them what I had learned in bee school: "After a few hundred stings over the course of several successful bee-keeping seasons, the experienced bee-keeper will either become immune or allergic". How do you like your chances?

So I started doing a little research on this phenomenon because, well, it just doesn't seem fair, damnit! I found that the old saying is pretty much true. Bee-keepers who experience stings every now and then usually build up an immunity - meaning, when they are stung they still feel the same burn and sting as everyone else, but they don't react to it the same way anymore - both mentally and physically. An immune bee-keeper who gets a sting probably scratches out the stinger and moves on. They do not itch or swell up like other people might.

Now, immunity is only half your odds. The other half of you will become spontaneously and unfortunately allergic. I have even read that the friends and family members of bee-keepers are the most likely to become allergic, as they are constantly interacting with low levels of the bee pollen and dust. Yea. Not fair (in exchange for all of your love and support we bring you - allergies!). The allergies can vary - from your sting swelling up and itching like crazy, to "My Girl". Sorry. I said that. I have even heard of old bee-keepers who developed the allergy after years working with their hives. They come back from the field one day swollen up beyond recognition. Poor Joe - one of the farm's neighbors who experienced this exact situation. He donated all of his old bee books to James and I since he can no longer be around his hives. Ironically, the cure to any allergy is... MORE! Wee! You hate being stung by bees, well you know what the doctor ordered? More bee stings!

A young bee - you can tell because of his fuzzy little head.
Bees are like men - they bald as they age.
 I swear I have even seen one with the signature middle aged "cal-de-sac".

Seriously. As someone who has battled with allergies my entire life, I can tell you first-hand that the only treatment for allergies is experiencing them more often. Hence, allergy shots. This is also the reason James swears he has no allergies. Growing up on a farm exposes you to pretty much anything you could be allergic to, in great doses, all of the time.

So, you take your chances with the bees. You either get used to it or... you don't. For us, we always keep an epi-pen handy.

Buddy the Bee Man

Since we are on the topic of characters, I thought I would tell you a little about Buddy the Bee Man.  Remember how I mentioned that James and I attended a bee school? No? Ok. James and I went to bee school. We decided to go when we first started looking into bee-keeping. There were classes at the agricultural center near his parent's farm.

We registered for class, bought our books and went. It was two nights, stretched out over two weeks. Not too bad, but it was about 4 hours a night. We figured if we were going to learn about bees we might as well do it right.

So there we sat, in bee school, a room full of people who were all there for the same reason. We surveyed our fellow bee-keepers. There were plenty of older couples, who wanted to keep bees as a hobby. There were a lot of farmer-type men, with overalls and flannel shirts. There were some really old people, who had been bee-keeping for years but wanted to come to bee school for shits and giggles, I guess. Then there was us. We were the youngest people by there by at least two decades. It also sounded like we were the only people there who didn't already have a hive up and running.

We opened our workbooks and got settled in for the lecture. I told you, this was legit bee school.  Our teacher introduced himself, Buddy. Buddy had to be approaching his 90s, had on his farmer uniform, and a little trucker hat with a bee on it. He walked us through the material and told us all of his personal stories. He drug in his bee equipment and showed us how it worked.

As newcomers to the bee world, attending this bee school has already proved invaluable. There are so many things that we would have screwed ourselves doing without this instruction first. If you are thinking about beekeeping I highly recommend you get in touch with your local agricultural extension, college, or bee-keepers association to see if they offer similar training.

Now, I have mentioned before that James and I are very analytical planners. When we first started thinking about bee-keeping we invested in as many bee books as we could get our hands on. We read over them and did the research online. We wanted to make sure that if we invest our time and money into something, we know all about it.

However, as much research as we've done, we learned one main thing from bee school. Buddy repeated this throughout the classes: "The bees don't read the books."

The bees don't read the books. They don't do the same thing every single time. You can't read something in a book and expect everything to go as planned. All apiaries are different. Sure enough, we've learned, they certainly don't read the books. At least not the same books we're reading, anyways.

Sweet golden nectar

Throughout our bee-keeping journey, we are often asked if we will be selling our honey. It's a great thought. We might, depending on how much we harvest when the time comes, but the truth of the matter is that honey is just a by-product of what we started bee-keeping for: pollination. We got out little bumble butts up and running to help the orchard (you may have read this in a previous post) that we had planted at James' parents' farm. We never really anticipated harvesting honey to sell. I like to drink green tea with a dab of honey, especially now, when I am suffering from what is likely a sinus and upper respiratory infection. Not only does it sooth my throat, but it helps develop an immunity to local allergens, too, I am told. 

About half-way through the summer we checked on our little friends to see how everything was going. Low and behold they had already set up their little bee nursery and honey comb. The bees had only been in their new 'hood for a few short weeks and they were already busting their butts. That's what bees do, anyway, right? 

James holding up one of the frames, heavy with brood stock (below) and honey(above).

James approached them and pulled out a frame for me to see. The same frames that I had just recently built and places in their hive was now glowing golden yellow and literally dripping with honey. I placed my hand under the frame and let the hot honey drip out onto my fingers for a taste. Yup. Grade A, certified, organic, all natural bee juice. 

That's honey! Dripping off of the frame.

It was amazing to see how much our bees had accomplished in such a small amount of time. It was also exciting to see what they could be making for us. Now this honey was on a regular hive frame, so it wasn't our honey to take. We set up honey supers shortly after. Honey supers are special hive boxes that are placed on top of the regular hive, with a separator between them. The separator keeps the queen from getting into the honey supers and laying eggs. This means the honey supers are filled with honey, just for harvesting. Unfortunately, since it is our bees first year, the honey supers didn't have much in them by the time fall came around and we decided to leave what was there alone, so they would have more to eat over the winter, and hopefully be a strong hive when they emerge this spring.

Me, holding some of the burr comb honey that they had built on the top of the frame.

But, alas, we had had our first taste of our own bees' honey. It was glorious. We have been told that each hive should produce between 80-100 pounds of honey next year so Be on the lookout next year for some freshly jarred honey. You'll know exactly where it came from!