Worth A Load Of Hay

There is a rhyme among Beekeepers:

A swarm in May is worth a load of hay,

A swarm in June is worth a silver spoon, 

A swarm in July ain't worth a fly.

Lynden Swarm

 We lost several of our hives this last winter. Some were due to disease, others blew over in a wind storm and died.
I knew that the price of packaged bees had gone up significantly and was not in the budget to purchase more bees, so I prayed.
I know how much my husband loves working with the bees and how much I love the honey. Plus the price of honey has also gone up so we might be able to recoup some of our cost by selling the honey.

Everson Swarm 

Sean got a call on Sunday to go catch a swarm in Lynden and we went and checked it out. Both of these swarms were on the trunk of a tree, much more difficult to catch than the ones on a branch. We went to our friends, Zach and Tammy and borrowed a shop vac, extension cords and tape, lots of tape. Then, Sean created a bee vacuum and we vacuumed the bees into a box and hived them. We had to give them time to all get in the new hive, so we went home and came back later to get them. Sean was concerned about the keeping the hive intact so I rode in the back seat of the Honda Car with the hive.

On Tuesday, he got another call for a swarm, we were not able to go get them till about 7 P.M. Really, much too late to get started but we tried anyway. He set up a similar bee vacuum this time directly into the hive. This proved to be more difficult, and the bees were not happy about being disturbed so late in the day. Sean got stung twice on his hand. I forgot to bring the lavender and emu oil so his hand swelled significantly. I prayed that he wouldn't get stung anymore since usually when you get stung the other bees sense that you are a threat and will continue to sting.

I was in charge of keeping the cords and hoses free of kinks and trying to keep the suction at a good pressure. I was on my knees on the hard ground trying to keep quiet and do my job well. There is something very disconcerning about watching 100 bees line up on the seam between your husbands bee suit and veil, then watching a few lone bees disappear between your husbands legs!
Thankfully, there were no more stings. We finally finished at 10 P.M. so there were no fliers, and since none of bees that were not in the hive would not survive the night we decided to take the hive home. Again, I sat in the back of the BRV to assure that the hive would not come apart on the drive.

I am so very thankful for God's provision and answer to even the simplest prayers. Be careful what you pray for He might just say Yes! 

Oh Honey

It is our 3rd season of Beekeeping and we finally have honey! This weekend, in the midst of cleaning the house, organizing the garage, planning for school, shopping and batch cooking. Sean decided to remove the honey supers from the hives and extract honey. Above he is standing on a 6 foot ladder smoking the bees down out of the upper boxes on our biggest colony in the Vertical Top Bar Hive.

This picture is taken of the bottom of the vertical top bar hive. I love how the bees build the comb so perfectly! This box is so heavy with honey that I could not lift it! The different colors are from different types of pollen. Some people call it bee bread, The bees put different pollen in the cells then fill it with honey and cap the cells.

This is another view of one of the top bar frames. The dark spot in the middle is some pollen that the bees stored in the middle of the capped honey. We will filter the honey to remove the pollen.

Sean built this Bee Escape from some plans he found on the Internet. He built 3 of them, however we only used them for 2 hives that we are harvesting from. Our other hives are smaller so we are leaving their honey for them to use this winter. They were amazing on the Langstroth hives, the honey supers were empty and we did not even have to try to get any bees out! They were not as effective on the Top Bar Hives. We are not sure why but we did have to smoke the bees out of the upper boxes and still had a few stragglers when we opened the boxes in the garage.
We borrowed the extractor from the bee club and used that for the Langstroth extraction but the top bar extraction is done using gravity and filtration. When we get to that I will post some photos.

He's proud of what his girls accomplished! So far we have a little over a gallon and a half of honey!

Date Night

Last week my mom came for a visit all by herself! Sean and I were eager to take advantage of that and get a rare date night. I was all dressed and ready to go when I got a call from 9-1-1. You see we are on the swarm catchers list and when someone calls 9-1-1 they call us. I am not one to turn down a swarm and neither is Sean, I grabbed our bee box and headed out. I figured that we could catch the swarm, eat dinner, then head home and hive the bees.
When we got to the swarm, I knew it was not going to be a simple as I thought. There were more bees than I have ever seen! It was massive and instead of settling on a branch, which is easier to catch they were on a lilac tree trunk. Instead of just pruning the branch, putting them in the box and being on our merry way, we had to figure out how to get them off the vertical limb and into the box. We had to get a larger box from a spectator because ours was not big enough.

Just in case you don't know the difference between men and women this swarm catching shows the drastic differences. Sean is all business and gets in there with some intensity. I however, had my bee suit on over skirt and my cute shoes on for our date, I also really did not want to mess up my hair (I was still holding out for dinner).

Catching a swarm is a spectacle and people seem to come out of the woodwork to watch, from a safe distance. I think the bees are fascinating and I want to educate people about them. So while I prune, and help Sean I also talk to the people, I even took the homeowners camera and put it in our swarm box to get a really good photo of the bees for her. One woman noticed my shoes and we had a great conversation about how cute and comfortable they are. I told her I got them at Goodwill and she was impressed!

Sean, didn't say more than 3 sentences the entire time, and was a little irritated that I viewed this as a social event. Later however, he laughed about it and said that was one of the fundamental differences between us. It took us 3 hours to catch this massive swarm and we got them safely in the back of my mom's car that I was driving! Only 3 or 4 were on the outside of the box. To say my mom was not impressed would be an understatement but she is pretty good at taking the good with the bad.

After we caught them, I was ready to go eat but we received another 9-1-1 call to catch another swarm. We went home, dropped off the bees in the garage and set up a swarm lure for the other
colony. We got home after 11:30 P.M. and ate some cereal and went to bed.

We were going to wait until Sean got home from work the next day to hive the bees. Unfortunately, my mom was home with the children while I went to get a haircut and when she went out to the garage, bees were everywhere! The weight of the bees on the lid of the cardboard box pulled the lid down and the bees escaped through the gap in the top!

The photos above show the garage door, and some of the unfortunate bees that succumbed to the heat in the garage.

We were able to put the remaining bees into a Warre hive 4 boxes deep! our others are only 2 deep. They have built incredible amounts of comb and are thriving despite their tragic losses.

Cleaning the dead bees out of the garage will take some time and effort, Aaron is able to wear his shoes again, however I keep finding bees, and finding bees, and finding bees.

The second swarm did not take and we just captured 2 more queens! The bees are amazing.

We never did get our dinner. Maybe next time.

It's Summer!

Yesterday was officially the first day of summer. Usually I would have a party and some games and crafts.

Considering the fact that I have been sick with a fever, achy body, head ache and just want to sleep we did nothing except go the the chiropractor and the naturalopath.

God provided our entertainment. We have been doing a mini unit study on Painted Lady Butterflies and they emerged from their cocoons yesterday. It was spectacular to watch them emerge, and unwrinkle their wings then finally to fly around the chrysalis. We have also had the privilege to watch our bees draw and amazing amount of comb in just 3 days.

Sean built a Warre Top Bar Hive as an experiment to emulate Bees in the wild. The bees begin their colon in the top of a tree, or wall cavity, or whatever then they build down.

Currently, most beekeepers use a Langstrof hive where the bees begin at the bottom then work their way up. We have 3 Langstrof hives but the Warre is phenomenal to see what the bees are actually doing. Sean put in 2 shutters so that we can remove them and watch through Plexiglas to see the bees progress.

In these photos you can see the white honeycomb that they are building and if you enlarge the photo you can see some of the worker bees inside each cell.

In just 3 days they built the comb all the way to the bottom of the first box! There is no honey stored in there yet, but there is a lot of pollen being brought in.
I suppose I do not always have to plan some extravagant celebration we can just look around and enjoy God's creation.

And The Winner Is....

Congratulations to Kelly! I admit that I did not do a random drawing for the winner of our first taste of Honey~anyone willing to do that kind of research deserves the reward! Thanks Tami and Steph for your comments as well, I love comments!
It has been 2 years and 5 weeks since we brought home our first package of bees. Officially we are in our 3rd season Beekeeping. However we only have 3 hives right now and hoping and praying for some more! I am thankful that we are down to 2 hives on our property, it is a bit intimidating. We placed our other hive in our friends' orchard.
Kelly, look for your honey to arrive soon!

Honey

It's Official! We finally have honey~One whole Quart!!
It is early in the season so we hope for a sticky delicious harvest.
Does anyone want to guess how many hives we have, and how long we have waited for honey? If you are correct I will send you a sweet little reward.

Just to give you a little hint, we lost some hives this winter and Sean's father, Ivan, brought us an extra queen he had. We artificially swarmed one of our strong hives in hopes of another colony.

Both of these men really like their bees! Ivan drove 3 1/2 hours to bring us our new queen, stayed for a couple hours then drove 3 1/2 hours home! That is commitment.

The picture of Taylor above happened recently when Sean got a call to come catch a swarm, I was putting the children to bed so I could not go help. Taylor went and they both ended up getting stung pretty bad. Fortunately, Taylor only got stung once but it was right on her eyelid/eyebrow area (the one area she did not have covered). Sean did not fair as well, he was wearing his Chacos and got 5 stings on one foot.

I know it does not sound very compassionate, but the swollen appendages really make me laugh. They look fake, without any wrinkles or prints. Every time I look at it I laugh, Sean doesn't like that.
Taylor has been quite the trooper and still enjoys helping with the bees. It is a sweet reward made all the sweeter by the work we have invested into it.

Bye Honey?

These photos are from two different swarms. As we were getting ready to leave for the camping trip the bees swarmed again. Some families watch TV for fun, others ride bikes, we watch bees swarm. Sean and the children sat on the porch with the bees flying all around. I actually had all the children loaded in the van ready to go for over an hour while we finished catching the bees and re-hiving them. The first swarm landed in the tree of our backyard neighbor. We got a phone call from here while we were gone that the bees were swarming and could we please control our bees?!? Ummm, it's not like a dog you can tie up.

The second (or is 4th?) swarm that we caught landed in our next door neighbors tree in her front yard. Sean came home from work, he had a co worker with him that helped to catch the swarm this time. The co-worker was impressed by the swarm and had no bee keeping experience but was extremely calm. He had a layer of thick bees on his hand and asked, "Now what do I do? How do I get them off?!"

This was probably the biggest swarm yet. We moved a new hive to the side yard away from the other 3 hives. Then Sean got into the main hive that kept swarming and removed 13 swarm cells! No wonder they kept swarming. Usually when a new queen emerges the old queen takes off with part of the hive and a lot of honey and the new queen kills all the other swarm cells. It looks like we are going to buy 2 new queens and remove the queens that are not doing there job effectively.

Hopefully bee swarming is resolved and we did not lose all our honey for the second year in a row.

Unfortunately, I have no photos from the Scout camping trip but you can see some of there activities and pictures at Renee's blog and Syndi's blog.
They had a lot of fun hiking and playing. Aaron even had to get some first aid on a lump on his head after a very rough game of pine cone tag OUCH!

Ian, Ruby, Libby and I had a wonderful time at Grandma Chris' house. She fed us, we played on the slip and slide, ate some more and slept! We did end up with a fair number of bug bites but not as many as the boys and Taylor.

Erik got to go home with Grandma. When the children turn 7 they get a week at Grandma's house. Erik has been waiting his turn ever since Taylor got to go 4 years ago. He is looking forward to letters from home, swim lessons, finding the large lizard in Grandma's back yard, and visiting the enormous frog at Grandma's neighbors house.

How to catch a swarm you ask?
1. Call your husband and have him come home from work
2. Give hubby the bee veil and opt for the bee suit for yourself
3. Climb the neighbor's fence (not as easy as when I was a kid)
4. Give your husband the pruners and long handled shears while holding the ladder steady and hoping not to get stung
5. Climb the ladder and hold the 40 pound box steady with one hand while hanging on to the ladder with the other hand and pray that you don't fall, hubby doesn't fall, and you don't drop the box of bees
6. Pass a fully loaded box of bees over the fence to your 11 year old daughter in a sundress and flip flops
7. climb back over the fence
8. Put a pretty sheet over a board so the bees have a runway to enter into the new hive

9. Thoroughly spray the bees with Honey Be Healthy

10. Put the branch that you hope the queen is on in the hive

11. Put the cover back on the new hive

12. Pray that the bees stay and you have a new hive

Taylor took this photo, sorry it is a bit blurry. I like that you can see how full the box is and that there are still bees on the outside as well.

As of this posting Thursday evening the bees are still in the hive and doing well. They have drawn out a lot of comb.

This morning I could not face trying to do 'regular' math so I invented Army Guy Math. We took our box of army guys and I drew numbers with the corresponding number of circles on a page then gave the children a number of army guys that could be evenly divided by that number. For example, I gave Aaron 36 army guys and he had the number 9 he had to show me that 36/9=4, 36/4=9, 9X4=36, Then he had to go further and show me 6X6=36, 36/6=6, you get the idea. It was really fun! Aaron ended up using the squares on the kitchen floor because they had more space.

Even Ruby and Ian got into it. Erik was a bit frustrated that the Army guys would not stand perfectly straight in a row on his page and that he did not have the exact same army guy for each circle but he did understand the concept and willingly participated.

In the afternoon my momm, Geaba, came up and did a science experiment with Justin, Erik and Ian. Taylor and Aaron were at Ben's house learning about the American Revolution. Ian was able to tell me all about how the lung oxygenates the blood and it goes back to the heart and the heart pumps it to the rest of the body. He winked at me and said, "We are just pretending that the red dye 40 is blood." What a smart kid! As though the balloons were really lungs and a heart!

They did a couple of other science experiments on lung capacity. I literally blew everyone out of the water.

Ruby wanted to make cupcakes with pink frosting. I mean really wanted to make cupcakes with pink frosting. I told her we could make them after her nap. RIGHT when she woke up she said, "Let's go make cupcakes with pink frosting!" She got her apron and chef's hat and went to work. Thanks to the pictures provided by Betty Crocker she was able to 'read' the directions and tell me we needed 3 eggs, water and oil! I think she has figured out that the cook gets to taste the goodies! I had to go to the store for a few items anyway, so I spent $2.69 on pink frosting! All in the name of love.

All this while I was trying to get ready for the boys to go camping with the scouts tomorrow! I made a double batch of the PB&J Breakfast Cookies from Fix, Freeze and Feast (I do alter them a little, but they are delicious, and healthy) What does it mean when you have to double a batch cooking recipe?

And this long winded post will end with another Libby update. I really appreciate all the prayers and encouragement. I do think that everyone over reacted and that she does have a high metabolism. Thanks to Naomi for the concrete evidence about Sophie. I am still a bit concerned about her elevated liver enzymes but with nothing presenting itself we will watch and see. I would love to have that type of metabolism! I am still religiously feeding her around the clock and giving her fortified breast milk at every feeding. I am pumping, but not every feeding like before.

Have a great weekend!

I am not laughing

My sweet little Libby has been gaining! She averaged 1 oz per day last week. I was very excited, however the doctor said that she really wants Libby to keep gaining 1 oz a day and move up on the growth chart to the 25th percentile. I would be excited and satisfied if she stayed on her growth curve and that is my goal. This sweet little 5 month old is blowing bubbles and rolling all over the place. I was attempting to clean up and get some schoolwork done when I looked out the back door and saw this:

last week I thought our bees were swarming but they ended up coming back, so I realized that it was the nuptial flight.The nuptial flight is when the the queen mates then comes back to the hive to start laying. We recently split our hive into two so we were waiting for the queen to emerge and have two separate hives.

This was definitely a swarm and the bees clustered on a tree in our neighbor's yard. They were about 13 feet up. Sean came home from work and together we caught the swarm and introduced them to a new hive. While I was otherwise occupied Ruby discovered a brand new can of spray sunscreen. I do not have to worry about my kitchen floor or cabinets or refrigerator getting sunburned anytime soon.

We accomplished science today and now I am going to feed my children and send the older one's over to Syndi's for history. Once again, math and spelling got put on the back burner.

Look What the Girls Did!

I had a bee crawl up my pants on Thursday and I did not want to get stung! I dropped my pants right there in the yard and reached back to make sure she was gone and guess what? She wasn't! I got the little stinger right in the thumb. This photo shows what happened within the first few hours. I ended up taking my rings off and swelling all the way down my wrist.

You can't really see the amount of swelling but my hand looks like a prosthetic or a mannequin. It really hurts and I can't use it very well. I am typing one handed and it is taking a long time. I will update more later and hopefully it will be more functional by tomorrow.

Feeding the Bees

I am so thankful that Sean has taken an interest in the 'girls' He is currently taking a beekeeping class on becoming an apprentice beekeeper. There really is a lot to learn and it is quite fascinating. One thing I have learned is that feeding the bees can be quite expensive. In the last 10 days Sean has made sugar syrup for the bees several times. You need to feed them before winter comes if they don't have enough honey stored (which they don't because of the swarm). The winter solution is more concentrated than the spring but still, he has used up 157 cups of sugar.

Granted I do not agree but still I guess I understand why the commercial guys use High Fructose Corn Syrup. Did you know that they can sell organic honey even if the bees were fed on that junk? It appals me, Really it does!

Look at this man, he loves taking care of the bees. He keeps a journal of their activity, takes classes, attends the beekeeping meetings, and spends quite a bit of money on them. He even loves the smell of the propolis on his hands. All this from a guy who thought I was crazy to start on the bee endeavor and when we went to pick up the bees he said I was nuts.

I do miss getting in the hive- not literally- but the bee suit does not fit at this point and they do not know the effects of bee stings on unborn babies.

Removing the Honey Super

We removed the honey super today. Much to our dissappointment, but not surprising we did not have any honey to harvest this year.

Sean is really enjoying beekeeping. He loves the smell of the propolis mixed with alcohol(used to remove propolis) and is a very good teacher.
Jake and Savannah came over for breakfast then stayed over while Mr. Sean opened the hive and they got to see the queen. She is doing a great job, there are lots of eggs and larva. Hopefully our hive will winter over well and we can prevent a swarm next year.

They're Alive

It has been 5 weeks and our bees are still doing great! They have filled the bottom deep and we just added the upper deep. They have been building comb in places that they weren't supposed to, but I think we have that figured out now.

Taylor has been great helping me and until yesterday she had not gotten a single sting. I have been stung twice-OUCH. But yesterday she was trying to help the bees that were on the ground in front of the hive and got stung 3 times!! I told her she could use my bee gloves next time she wanted to pick up the girls.

My wonderful husband, Sean has repeatedly said that is is my hobby and I am the expert. I think he is really getting into it and is very concerned with them. He has even taken over making the syrup and removing the misplaced comb. He does it all in shorts and flip flops!! What a man.

He did check his shorts before he came in the house. The risk is that when bees land they like to go UP. I think it is a pretty risky thing being a man and wearing shorts around a hive.