Busy bees.
Hello! Beagle Tilly playing in the yard.
As I mentioned in my previous post, there are a lot of exciting things going on this spring. One of those things has been a transition into a new job! My new role involves managing historic properties and their their rehabilitation. I’m working all over the state with all kinds of people and all kinds of buildings, so there are some very long days and some work on weekends…. but I’m really enjoying it and I already have some great stories to share! But that’s for another time.
On the home front we’ve been gardening away winter blues and doing our best to get back into our remodeling. We’re officially two years into our “project”… which might seem like a long time to remodel a tiny house, but we’ve still remained true to our DIY goals and our budget, managed to work full time and squeeze in graduate school, as well as spend time with friends and family. One day (hopefully sooner rather than later) we’ll finish this house… and it will be grand. In the meantime, we’re still chugging along and trying to enjoy every minute. More on that later.
Another one of those exciting things that has come to realization this spring was the arrival of our honeybees. Last Saturday Jeff of DC Honeybees pulled up in front of our house with 200+ lbs of bees in the back of his car. A little more than 4 lbs were to be placed in our backyard!
4 lb units of honey bees are called “packages” and you order them along with a new queen. The idea is that you can shove them all into a box and with a little luck have a relatively instant hive once the bees settle into their new home. Here is our package sitting on the butcher block in our kitchen while we chatted. A few escapees flying around overhead plinking occasionally into light bulbs.
Here the package has been moved outside near the awaiting hive. Jeff had just sprayed the bees with sugar syrup to they would be occupied with grooming themselves instead of flying- this helps when pouring the bees from the travel box into the hive. Below he is using a hive tool to lift up a can of syrup that both feeds the bees during transport and keeps them in the cage. That little box to the right of his hand is the Queen Cage– our royal lady bee is in there!
The empty hive– all level and ready to receive its new tenants!
With the can of syrup removed, Jeff dumps the bees into the hive and places the queen cage between a set of frames. The queen is kept in her cage by a small candy plug that the other bees eat through over the course of a few days, releasing her into their new home. Watch!
What I was trying to say in the above video before I got distracted by all the bees flying around was how remarkable I thought it was that Jeff was working the hives (his own and ours) without veils or gloves. I had seen a video of him checking his hives with his daughter– he was calm and never got stung, yet his daughter got stung when she panicked and waved her arms around. Check it out here. As you can see in our own video, the bees are pretty docile. Jeff even scoops up a handful of the bees… and one even lands on Banjo Boy’s face without incident!
Studies have shown that when bees are allowed to build their own wax from scratch instead of on commercial foundation, they vary the size of the cells in the wax and are better able to resist disease and pests. Since this is a more natural approach to bee keeping (and cheaper!) we opted to give it a shot. We’ll see how it works and weigh the pros and cons at the end of our first season. Meanwhile, the bees had 8 days to get nice and settled, and it was time to see how much building the bees had accomplished…. so in we dove!
This is a before picture of a “foundationless” frame. The strips of wax are meant to act as guidelines for the bees.
Already there’s considerable comb being built– see?!
Here’s a close up of the comb and bees. Good job bees! Way to go! Keep it up!
Once they fill out most of the frames in the first box, we’ll stack another “deep” (hive box) on top and they’ll keep on building. So far they’ve been easy easy easy, totally pain free, and lots of fun to watch. We’ll keep you posted!
