Portland

Megan came to Oregon for the weekend, and I was lucky enough to be able to spend most of Saturday with her. First stop was the Japanese Gardens.






Second stop was the Chinese Gardens, but my camera was in the car unfortunately. We ran around Portland a bit and stopped at Saint Cupcake. The carrot cake was good, but the others were a little dry. This has been my experience with all cupcake shops. Megan made a good point when she said that homemade cupcakes always turn out better and more moist. The only problem with that is that then you have 30 of them.


It was nice to have a relaxing day to catch up! It was kind of like pretending she still lived here. Hope to see you again in a month or two Megan!

Bee Patties

So something I didn't know about bees is how susceptible they are to many parasites and diseases. Every major and most minor beekeepers use a lot of pesticides and chemicals to keep disease down. These chemicals are so nasty it is actually illegal to collect honey for sale while some of them are being used. We are going to attempt to keep disease down in our bees without using anything toxic. Our neighbor uses this philosophy and his bees are very healthy. Many beekeepers would say this is crazy, but we are going to try. Hopefully we aren't just being idealistic, but it seems excessive to be constantly medicating them if you keep them healthy.
Tonight I made some bee patties made from Crisco, livestock salt, sugar and honey. The bees eat the patties and in the process they get greased up. This keeps both tracheal and varroa mites down because they can't get a good grip on the bee. We have a screen and sticky paper at the bottom of the hive to catch all the mites that fall off the slippery bees. A suspected benefit to this greasing is increased longevity in the bees - about a week. Soon we will also dust the bees with powdered sugar - this promotes grooming and again prevents the varroa mites from getting a good grip. They fall down on to the sticky paper and die.

Babies!

Can't wait can't wait can't wait to see this tomorrow!

Wax Glands and Waggle Dances

I'm glad you are all enjoying bee updates! (Well, my two faithful readers, anyway). To answer a few questions, the burr comb is real, they build comb wherever there is space. But when they build outside of the frames, everything gets stuck together and it becomes hard to manipulate the frames and later to extract honey. I need to ask our bee mentor about why beeswax is yellow - but I have a very good guess. It comes out of their wax glands white, they then chew it up and manipulate it, which makes it more white. However they are bringing in all sorts of pollen and nectar which I think stains the wax the yellow color. I'll update on this once I know for sure. I found this picture on the internet of the wax coming out of the bee's wax glands:


This kind of grosses me out because they look like fish scales. Which gross me out.

Anyway, I leave you with this amazing video of how they communicate food sources to each other.

OH! And we found out our beautiful black queen is rare! They are usually more honey colored. Which makes me love her that much more.

Queen Bee

We found our beautiful queen today. She is right in the middle of the picture below.



And blurry here

We did our first inspection today looking for eggs and the queen. We did not find any eggs - but they may be there, they are 0.4 mm x 1.7 mm, with the narrowest end pointed up. It's hard to see something so small with a veil on. The next time we do an inspection there should be larvae, which will be much easier to see. I couldn't believe how much they had built in just 8 days.

Looking for eggs


This is burr comb - where they have decided to make comb wherever they want instead of on the frames which already have a honeycombed pattern. The pattern is to encourage them to build on the frame. I'm not sure yet why burr comb is so bad, but the book says it is, so I removed all of it.


Here is the burr comb, it's gorgeous. They have begun to collect the sugar water we've fed them and put it into the cells. We definitely already ate all that was in the burr comb, tastes like honey! It's much lighter weight than you would expect by looking at it.


They build the cells so that they are opposite each other, three cells on the opposite side intersect in the middle of one cell on the other side. It's kind of hard to explain, but they have built the comb so that it is as strong as it can be. How they do this in a dark hive I have no idea. You can sort of see what I am saying here:

Here is a picture of what the drawn out comb should look like. There is also a drone in this picture, that is what we mistakenly thought was the queen last time. They are fun because they don't have stingers, so if you find one you can handle it without worrying about being stung.


That's it for Beekeeping 101 today. We will be doing weekly inspections for the next month or two and each time there should be new and exciting things happening!

Bee Watching

There's been a lot of this going on lately.


We have been reading all about bees at night before bed. How they organize the hive. What happens to intruders - they either get thrown violently out, like literally expelled from the hive, OR if they bring a bribe for the guard they are allowed in to take a small amount of honey. The stages of work they progress through and how the workers determine how many drones are needed or when a new queen is needed. They control this by the size of cell they build and by what they feed the larva. They are so complex and interesting that we find ourselves sitting outside the hive just watching how they interact. Yesterday was the first day they began bringing pollen back! That means they are settled enough to go out and begin foraging for nectar and pollen.


I found two bees the other day that were victims of our sugar water accident (we dumped several cups of sugar water down onto the hive being clumsy). I put them in front of the hive entrance to see if what I thought would happen would. It did, their sisters came to them, rolled them right side up and began cleaning the sugar off of them with their tongues. Unfortunately it was too late for these girls, but so cool to see that they are all looking out for each other. We will get to inspect as soon as it gets sunny for a good chunk of time. Maybe this weekend! Hopefully we will spot the queen and see the progress they are making on drawing out the frames with wax.

One more bee story I meant to tell:
I was out in the yard and a bee landed on my shoulder, which was unusual. I started to walk towards Aaron so he could coax it off of me when she flew on her own and then collapsed on the hive. She was exhausted! It took her a few minutes of rest before she made it to the entrance. They are such hard workers and only live for 6 weeks once they become a worker bee.

Plate Lunch

Aaron made Hawaiian food the other day. Macaroni salad and Kalua Pig. The pork turned out really good, but it was a little too salty. I would cut back quite a bit on the liquid smoke and salt. Easy and good!