Honey!

We pulled honey last weekend...
Aaron getting the smoker going

The middle hive pulled apart.  We had a huge swarm a few months ago we were unable to catch, and then cold rain came for about a week, so we lost them all.  It had to have come from this hive, because there were hardly any bees left, and even though there had been quite a bit of honey earlier in the year, it was mostly gone too.  We pulled this hive apart and left the few bees to absorb into the neighboring hives.

Aaron with our honey!

We added in Apiguard to treat for varroa mites, you can see the little boxes we put in the middle to make room for it.  

Honey taking over our kitchen.

This is always a sticky mess!

Aaron, extracting.

Honey!  We got just under 7 gallons this year.

Aaron did get stung on the last hive.  He always has a huge reaction, but this was his smallest one actually.  We always take a preventative loratadine, and he took another one right away with this sting. I've only had 3 stings in 3+ years, which I think is pretty good.

They all look the same, but we separated out 3 kinds of honey this year.  5 gallons of one, 3/4 gallon, and half of another.

I have to switch out the medicine in a week, remove it for the winter, and then they will be tucked away and I get a break from beekeeping for a few months.

Lovely Weekend

Friday I hit up Zumba, then made my way to Eugene to meet up with Ashlee for a few hours.  A visit to Sweet Life is always mandatory, we shared a lime tartlet it was perfection.  

This little sweetie has taken to jumping on my lap whenever I sit next to her.  It used to take a bribe of food to make that happen.  Now she just seems to enjoy my company.  The feeling is mutual.

Saturday we cleaned and organized the basement.  I suck at before pictures!  It felt good to get that space together.  Then we headed up to Bridgeport to REI, where I found a black puffy half off.  I've been waiting for the perfect one.  I'm not sure it's perfect, but it is warm, which my old one is not.

Today we got up early and headed to Corvallis.  We went to see the lambs being born, but must have missed it by a week.  So we went out to Oak Creek and hiked about 5 miles.  I really, really miss having all those trails in my backyard.  

We did some shopping - yay new shoes!  Then had a yummy lunch at Block 15.  Aaron picked up a few bottles of this Petit Verdot.  I'm not much for beer, but this was delicious.

We grabbed some dough and ranch from American Dream and headed home to make the most of the rest of the day.  We used our clean basement space to knock out 45 frames and 3 boxes for the bees.  Using a nail gun made the job go much quicker than it has in the past without one.

For dinner I made a parmesan encrusted pork chop - new favorite way to eat pork chops.  Easy and super delicious!  

Farm Chores

Saturday was beautiful and we took advantage of it by going on a nice bike ride, then heading over to the farm annex to do some chores. Our strong hive was doing really well and I felt confident there were enough bees to make a split and start another hive. Aaron hadn't looked in either hive yet this year, so he was happy to see they were doing well. So well that we actually needed to add another box for honey. Below is a frame full of brood, a sign of a good queen is a tight laying pattern. You can see she is doing an awesome job.



To make a new hive, we took a frame of the youngest (smallest) eggs we could find, the frame above full of sealed brood and a frame with open (you can see larvae in the cells) brood along with two full frames of honey from the previous hive and put them in a nuc box. The idea is that the bees will realize they don't have a queen, and make one from the fresh eggs. We searched each frame very carefully to make sure the queen wasn't on any of them - I hope we didn't miss here, there were a lot of bees on each frame. We leave the bees on the frames, they will tend to the brood and are called nurse bees. They haven't ever left the hive, so they will not return to the original hive. If there are any foragers that get moved, they will simply fly back to the "parent" hive. It's pretty awesome when it works. Now we have to wait 3 weeks and hope they will do their thing.
Aaron scraped off this "burr" comb and found these eggs on it.


The other chore to attend to was to dust the chickens with permethrin for the second time. Some of the girls had been shaking their head a lot, and we thought they might have lice. Luckily I have a great helper (Aaron used to help me, but my mom is much happier to help with chicken chores). Mabel is all ready to be dusted - can you tell it's a bit muddier here than in Hood River?


Then there's Camilla. This chicken has become ridiculously tame. She comes when you call her, and lets you pick her up and carry her around. No complaints.


She's gotten a bit spoiled, and has been getting out of their enclosure and into the barn. The other duty to get done was to raise the pen up so she couldn't fly out anymore.


My dad found this nest she made in the corner of the barn on the top of an alfalfa bale. Sneaky little chicken.

I Did a Bad Thing

A more appropriate title may be: "I feel like a bad person".
We took two hives into the winter - we had 3 last year, but one lost their queen late summer, so we over wintered two. Both survived, but one was clearly much stronger than the other. When I did the first inspection a few weeks ago, the weaker hive had very few bees in it compared to the stronger hive. In fact I didn't see much brood at all.
I began feeding both hives, and the weak hive didn't take any of the syrup I gave them. Another bad sign. I opened them yesterday with Aaron - just a peak in and we were greeting with lots of angry stingers. This usually means there is something wrong, like the queen is dead. We decided the best thing to do would be to break the hive down and save the honey that was left. If we had just left them eventually they wouldn't have been able to defend the hive, and other bees would have come in and "robbed" them of their honey. This means a wild frenzy of bees all over (including the possibility of the strong hive being robbed), and we lose the 35 pounds of honey in the hive we could use to start a new colony.
So I went over today and pulled the hive apart - carefully. There weren't many bees, but my were the ones that were there pissed. They would see me coming and head straight for my face. It took a while, but I just let the cold weather slow them down and eventually kill them.


They hovered in clusters for warmth.


I was surprised to find a queen in there. I teased her out into a plastic bag. We put her in vodka to make queen juice. The idea is that her queen pheromones go into the alcohol and in the spring you can use it with lemongrass oil to bait swarms. I do realize I sound like a total jerk right now, but the thing is when you deal in life, you also must deal in death. We salvaged as much from this hive as we could to have a successful year with a new hive.


There was one frame with brood, the other side looked about the same. No eggs, but some larvae and mostly capped brood. This time of year there should be 8-10 full frames of brood. This queen was not laying well anymore, hence the population decline.


All I had with me today was a camera phone, so sorry for the picture quality.

For those of you wondering what will happen with the farm this year - we took the chickens and bees to my parent's house in the country. The chickens are having a great time (and so are my parents!) and laying lots of eggs. My garden size has decreased dramatically - from 2200 square feet to 42 square feet. But I'm looking forward to a little break and I have my mom's big garden and Salem Harvest. I'm willing to sacrifice this year in order to get into a house that we own.

Weekend Update

We have been eating so well lately - this is really the best time of year for fresh food. Aaron has been making this salsa, you have to make it! Tomatoes, onions, garlic, jalapeno, cilantro, a few tablespoons white vinegar, quite a bit of salt and pepper. So pretty and good.


We've been eating it on tacos and by the bucket load with chips. We stopped in a Whole Foods today and I was pretty pleased to see I grew every variety of heirloom tomato they were selling. Our favorite by far is Cherokee Purple, the flavor is unparalleled. They do produce less than other varieties, but I think we will mostly grow them next year. Whole Paycheck was charging $4.00/lb for them! We estimate we grew over 200 pounds of tomatoes this year from 25 plants and very few went to waste. We sauced, canned, BLT'd and shared.


Speaking of good food we went on the Hood River Fruit Loop on Saturday for the Pear Festival and sampled lots of good local foods. We also found some good deals along the way - pears for $0.25/lb! Big ears of corn for $0.25/ear! The first Honey Crisps of the year and some baby alpaca yarn to make Aaron a winter hat.

Today we began preparing the bees for winter by treating them for mites with Api Life Var. This contains thymol and works as a fumigant in the hive. It comes in crystalline wafers which we cut into quarters, then wrapped them in aluminum screen to prevent the bees from just hauling them out the front door before they could do their job.


Then placed them on top of the brood chamber. We will switch them out in 7-10 days, then again 7-10 days after that, then remove the final ones for the winter. We saw a ton of mites this summer, so to keep them going strong through the winter we are going to knock those mite numbers down.


Our queenless hive is gone, there were just a few yellow jackets flying around in there today. It looks like they just massacred the bees left in there. We broke the hive down and brought it in for the winter.


Some good news to end on - Camilla laid an egg today! It had been over 4 months since she laid her last. Luckily I love that little chicken and we are not just going for egg production over here, but I am happy to have eggs from her again. They are perfect for those recipes that you halve that call for 1 egg.

Wedding details

I think I'm finally ready to start blogging about the wedding! I was so burnt out while planning it, but I'm in a much better place now that I don't have that stress hanging around anymore. We do not have our professional photos back, but I will start with the smaller things and work up. We made a lot of the details for the wedding. Sometimes because that's just how we are, sometimes because we couldn't find just what we wanted, or couldn't afford to buy it already made. These cufflinks are a good example of that. Aaron found a shirt at the Rack for $29. Marked down from $150! It is so nice and soft, but we found it just a few weeks before the wedding and it has French cuffs. Add finding cufflinks to the already long to do list!
After searching the internet for bee related cufflinks we found these. They were just what we wanted, but $50 by the time they are shipped!
So I went on Ebay and found a very similar bee charm. They are not silver plated, like the more expensive ones, but for just one day, that wasn't important to us. I got 4 for just a few dollars. Then I ordered 2 pairs of blank cufflinks from Etsy seller "everythingribbons". I can't remember the exact price, but I think it cost us $7 to make these, and we could have made two pairs for that price.
Here they are:


Super cute, but subtle. Aaron had to file the cufflink bases down a bit so they didn't show around the edges. A dab of E6000 and voila - custom cufflinks! The black seemed like it was going to wear off quickly so I gave them a coat of clear nail polish to protect them. They held up great and will work for any other occasion he would need them.

Spring Has Sprung

It has been a cold, wet spring, but we've had a few nice breaks and spring seems to be progressing. Our bees were buzzing yesterday.


These guys have been slower to produce than we had hoped, but they too became very active after this was taken.


We have half the garden in. My, it has been a feat. 2200 square feet is a LOT. We still have peppers, basil, squash, melons, pickling cucumbers and sweet potatoes to put in. Almost there!


Of all the things we planted in huge numbers - the tomatoes are what worry me the most. We planted 25 (Cherokee Purple, Black Cherry, Pineapple, Green Zebra, Marvel Stripe, San Marzano, Principe Borghese, Roma Paste, Black Trifele, Brandywine, and Silvery Fir). Tomatoes don't wait for you like potatoes, onions and squash do. The goal is to can, can, can! We'll see how that meshes with wedding works.
We went to a new trellising method - we don't have 25 tomato cages, and cages aren't that great anyway. We put T posts on the ends, then stakes between each plant (made from pallets, free is good!) and twine supporting each plant. We've already lost one tomato to wind, it happened before we got supports up, but hopefully this will work well.


Onions are going like crazy.


Potatoes too - one of my favorite things to grow. I love that you bury them and they just rise from the dead into this instant healthy plant.



Today was the first time in a few weeks we got 5 eggs! Camilla is laying again and back to her happy chirpy self. How weird that the middle egg looks brown, not green, I just noticed that...must be the background.


We also got lots of beans in this weekend, I'd like to can those too. I love canned green beans! As for wedding planning, it is moving along. I haven't blogged about it because honestly, I don't really enjoy it. The small projects are fun, but I'm finding the whole experience very stressful. I'm hoping I will do some posts after, but for now I don't want to ruin any surprises!

The White Hive

I was in Portland last week for a dental convention, and on my way home Friday I picked up 3 pounds of Italian honeybees and 1 mated queen. I rushed home, so we could get them in their hive before dark. It's not the ideal time to play with bees, but they had been in this box for 3 days, and we wanted to set them free. Bees put off a lot of heat, in fact when I put my hand to the side of the box I could feel heat pouring off of them. I put them on the floor of my car with the AC on and listened to them to gauge their comfort. Calm and quiet when they are the right temperature, loud and frantic when they are too hot. Their comfortable was a bit chilly for me, but I toughed it out.


We loaded everything up into the Subaru.


Getting set up


We quickly slipped the queen out. She comes in a cage, and the bees keep her fed. She was rather unhappy in that cage and ran back and forth. Here's where we messed up. There are so many ways you can install packaged bees. The man at the bee supply store gave me a mini marshmallow and a thumb tack and told me to remove the cork from the queen cage, fill it with a marshmallow and tack her to the top of a frame. Well the tack bent almost immediately and we said to hell with it and put her on the bottom in her cage with the marshmallow plug (the bees eat through it and release her). You can release a queen on the bottom, but generally you don't leave her in her cage. I was paranoid that she would fly off, so I didn't want to just release her. But the bottom of the hive is an open screen and it got down to freezing that night. They are acting fine, but we will have to open them when the weather cooperates to make sure she is there and laying eggs and didn't get chilled and die. We opened the hive two days later and removed the queen cage, it was empty. That doesn't mean she lived...just that they got the cage open and either released her or disposed of her body. What we should have done is left her up higher where the bees would cluster around her and keep her warm.


It was hard getting that can out to release the bees. He gave the cage a solid thwap against the hive stand to get the bees to drop.


Then dumped everyone in.



He replaced the missing frames and we sealed them up. It was quite a mess of angry bees flying around at first, but within 10 minutes 99% of the bees were inside and settled. Some stayed in the box so Aaron dumped them on the grass and gave them a plank to walk up.


The next day we checked the top feeder to make sure they were eating. They weren't. We had planned on adding a few frames of honey from another hive the next day, but the weather forecast was off. I was worried they would starve with no honey, no sugar water and rainy weather. We decided to sneak some frames of honey in and check the queen cage, because we realized we had not done the right thing. It was at that point we found the empty cage and after we opened them (quickly - it's best not to disturb a new hive for at least a week) that they started feeding and going out to forage. They seem to be doing well now, but I'm anxious to see how they are doing and if there is a queen in there.

New Hive

We are getting new bees in a few days from Ruhl Bee Supply in Gladstone. We originally ordered them to supplement our hive that didn't do well after the move. We had several options as far as combining, moving, but we decided to give them their own new hive. I think our weak hive is healthy as far as disease, their numbers just got knocked way down. So we decided to let them bounce back on their own. Last night we built the westerns and a nuc box we got last year. The nuc box is good for a recently caught swarm or a small hive. I didn't get any pictures of it, but it's basically just a small hive that holds 5 frames.
The westerns come in 4 pieces. Aaron uses wood glue (Gorilla brand - it's non-toxic) around the dove tails.


Then fits the corners together


Pounds them in place with a hammer, or his hands.


Pre-drills holes in each dove tail


Then nails them together.


That's it, easy! Building the frames is a bit more involved and tedious. We have enough for these new bees, but will have to make a bunch more soon once the bees get going. There are finally flowers open here, we are 2-3 weeks behind the valley, but it's cold and rainy, so no bees going out. I hope the weather clears up soon, it's not good for the trees or the bees when the flowers get washed away by rain before they can be pollinated.

My painting project for the day!