My first apiary harvest
This is the first year for my first hive of bees.
During their first year, the bees spend most of their energy and output into building the interior of the hive, and getting their population up. Honey production is secondary. So, if you want a first year hive to survive the winter, it is best not to harvest all of their honey.
This harvest represents 4 of the 9 honey frames which the bees had filled by early August. I will monitor their progress a few more times before the winter. If they have filled most of their 18 honey frames by then, I might take 4 more.
This harvest produced 138 ounces of filtered honey, enough wax to make a candle (the bright canning jar at the right of the picture), and enough snitching treats through the whole bottling process to keep my wife and I very happy.
If you're looking for a productive hobby, definitely consider beekeeping.
During their first year, the bees spend most of their energy and output into building the interior of the hive, and getting their population up. Honey production is secondary. So, if you want a first year hive to survive the winter, it is best not to harvest all of their honey.
This harvest represents 4 of the 9 honey frames which the bees had filled by early August. I will monitor their progress a few more times before the winter. If they have filled most of their 18 honey frames by then, I might take 4 more.
This harvest produced 138 ounces of filtered honey, enough wax to make a candle (the bright canning jar at the right of the picture), and enough snitching treats through the whole bottling process to keep my wife and I very happy.
If you're looking for a productive hobby, definitely consider beekeeping.
However, at my age, waking up every morning has become my hobby.
Goofy stuff like that goes viral and makes people a lot of money. I'd kick in a few bucks.
It's tempting, but I'm afraid it's against what I believe in, on many levels.
I need to get more hives and more knowledge.
But still, not a bad first season,
Well done!
The prairies came up this yeah in wide stretches of yellow sweet clover. As you can tell by the color of the honey, this is clover honey.
I will pass the "well done" on to the bees, although they really don't care about too damned much other than their jobs.
I hear that hammering a lot of tacks into a thin board and then placing that board tack-point-side up works pretty well against those critters.
I sit at the edge of the sweet corn each year on a Friday and Saturday night with a shotgun. You kill one and one gets away and the word seems to spread pretty quickly.
I have no idea how they communicate but if I do that when the corn first starts to produce. Usually two weekends back to back on a Friday and Saturday night. I loose very little to them for the year. If I do not do it then and they learn to take my corn and eat it. I can kill one racoon a week for a month and still they will return. Early enforcement seems to work much better.
I might try some of the black weed blocker that you can put down with some nails in it next year for the half ache I plant in corn. It would be interesting if it worked. Likely more expensive but still interesting to know.
We had two dogs. I had them on separate dog runs. The dog runs bordered my plot on two sides, the house bordered the plot on a third.
We never had a problem with critters in the corn, and in the PRC, the big problem is deer. I'm pretty certain it was because the critters smelled the dogs.
This is probably not a feasible solution for you, but it works on smaller plot.
Legally the state (in utah) is to provide permits to hunt and kill them when they get above 30 head in a farming area. My next door neighbor grows a lot of field corn for animal feed. It has to have the moisture in it below a certain point before you can harvest it or it molds.
Well the deer were eating everything and he filed for the permit to kill them in early October. Within a few days he received notice that he would get his permits for up to 20 head. There were about 80 eating his crop.
He received the permits, good for the calendar year on the 31st of december at about 4pm in the mail. The permit required a 24 hour notice ot the fish and game department before you could shoot anything. Government at its finest.
Very cool. And tasty.
I just read a recent study that claimed that the free market and bee keepers, without government intervention, were replenishing the population of honeybees. Good for you.
Respectfully,
O.A.
I'm convinced that the only thing keeping most people from working with bees is a fear of getting stung. Yes, it is inevitable, but happens far far less than most people would expect.
A former work buddy of my hubby was a beekeeper. Instead of selling us the finished product, he would sell us the screens and let us harvest the honey and wax ourselves, then return the frames to him. I miss that.
I'd keep bees too if I weren't allergic to bee venom.
Nice.
Urrrgg.
The really cool part for me though is working with the bees and experiencing how wrong are the popular misconceptions about bees. I'm sure most people don't take up the hobby because it's intimidating. But the bees, depending on the type you get, are surprisingly gentle.
Just be upbeat and calm when you work with them: don't move quickly or aggressively. I personally have the Frank Sinatra channel on Pandora playing when I work with the bees. It keeps me upbeat.
It also adds to the cool factor.
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...
and their honey here
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...
and its use in another local product (Austin Gelato Company) here:
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...
They are pretty much booked through the end of the year.
http://www.honeyflow.com/
And, after the little bit of "hand's on" I've gotten this year, I find myself asking what the point of the flow hive is.
Part of my "job" in the symbiotic relationship with the bee colony is to make sure that it is healthy: no diseases, no parasites, a productive queen, the brood not preparing to swarm away, etc. This absolutely requires "cracking open" the hive every two to four weeks for a manual inspection.
If the point of the flow hive is that you no longer have to crack your hive to get at your honey supers, then that still doesn't negate that you still have to crack the hive to do everything else.
What's more, if you don't crack the hive, then you don't know how much honey the bees have collected in their brood boxes or in the honey supers. So there is no way to do a rational determination of how much harvest is possible before endangering the hive's over-wintering food supply.
Perhaps the flow hive people have solved some of these concerns. I'm not sure that they can solve all of them.
And one more thing, I have gotten to really like (and I suspect it's a quite common opinion) working with the bees. I look forward to it. The flow hive, while neat, takes away some of that interaction.
I tried to save the bees in a traditional hive but failed to find the queen. I have been getting ready to use the hive I got for new bees.
I think the big advantage to the flow hive is not that you don't have to inspect the hive, which you do. But it simplifies the post-collection processing. There is also a suggestion that since the bees don't need to make as much wax they make more honey.
But I'm mostly interested in the phenomena. With the number of people who signed up I suspect we'll get some nice feedback over the next couple of years.
If you get one, be sure to let me know if it works for you. I'm learning as I go, so if you find it works, I will certainly consider it.
BTW, it looks like UncommonSense has also worked with bees, or at least has some knowledge of them. So that makes three of us.
The honey from Wm's bees was great. The aspect of a 4 or 5 to 1 ratio of effort in making wax vs making honey is a huge argument in favor of the flow hive.
It is wonderful that other people are interested in bees. Their genetics is also fascinating: drones do not exist genetically - they are just bio-envelopes in which one queen sends genetic packages to another queen (kinda like the detachable tentacles of some of the cephalopods).
Not as much to worry about in wintering over in CA. (Everything else, yes; wintering over of bees - not so much.)
Are your bees accustomed to you yet? I have seen veteran apiests handle bees without even a bee suit. That is a bit scary.
Jan
I also stand by the hive occasionally so the bees come to regard me as a non-threatening presence.
So, yes, the bees have become accustomed to me.
I also do not wear a suit when working with them. I wear a veil because I don't want a curious bee crawling in my ear or up my nose. I wear a long sleeved turtleneck and I tuck my pants into my socks so a curious bee doesn't crawl under my clothes. (Learned this the hard way on my first day with the bees. One crawled up my pants leg. I had to drop trou in the backyard to get it out. I did. No sting). I also wear latex gloves because the most likely place I'll get stung is on my hand, and if I do get stung, I can just pull on the latex and the stinger will pull right out of my skin. (This strategy was proved last week as I got my first sting. It was on the thumb webbing of my left palm. I accidentally squeezed a bee when I went to pick up a frame. I consider this sting completely my fault and not due to any aggression of the bee.).
My wife doesn't even do this much. She wears a veil, but with short sleeve and pants. She also doesn't inspect the hives directly. She's there with the smoker when needed.
The bees in my barn were aggressive at first - I could no longer tack up the horse in front of the house, for example. Over time, they have become milder towards me, though they are still aggressive towards strangers.
Guard bees.
Jan
I would expect that a feral variety would be more aggressive.
aren't they declining in numbers to the point that it's a threat to the
harvests in the u.s.??? -- j
.
Once again, Adam Smith is correct.