It has been a strange and mild winter and early spring here in North Texas. We never got our winter, no snow, no ice, only a few freezing days. In general it has been mild and dry. The weed grass has green up quickly and we've already had to mow twice in February.
My spring bulbs--paper whites and narcissus-- bloomed in mid February. No sign of the giant Amaryllis flowers just yet.
Our big male cottonwood tree has bloomed it's nasty pollen 'pony tails'/ pollen tassels the week of March 1st (not sure what to call the 3 inch long structure that holds the pollen, in our tree, they bloom out bright pink and yellow, then fade to just yellow). As soon as the pollen pods open, the tree is swarmed by birds looking to eat the tiny green caterpillars that are often inside the pods. This means one messy week in our yard. Between the yellow pollen dust, the bird poop and the dropping pods and pony tails, I know to accept a filthy car and to not hang out any laundry on the clothes line. As of March 5th, the pony tails are starting to drop which signals the end of this mess. In the next few days we'll start to see the first green leaves budding out.
So far it is a light year for dandelions, probably because it is so dry. The bees love the dandelions, so I'm hoping we'll see more over the next few weeks--yes, I'm hoping for weeds in my yard. Ha ha.
The Forest Pansy Redbud in the front yard bloomed on March 4th.
The bees have been able to fly for most of the winter. Our local beekeeping friend said that his hive inspection this weekend revealed that his hives were full of honey and he had to add a super. Typically Feb and March are rough times for bees since they have had to live off of their summer and fall honey stores all year. For them to be full of honey means that they were able to fly and collect nectar over the winter and did not have to rely on stored honey as much. This could be a good sign that this will a strong year for the bees.
We are still a full 3 weeks before the average last frost date for our area, but things are looking very spring like out there. So much so, that I've already planted a good portion of the garden on March 4th.
Showing posts with label bees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bees. Show all posts
Monday, March 5, 2012
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Hi Honey! Honey Processing 2011 -- extracting
Bright and early Monday morning (July 4th), we quickly loaded up the supers into our truck and headed up to our church to do the honey extraction.
At the church, we met up with our other beekeeping friend, who was able to borrow the extraction equipment from another bee keeping friend.
We loaded all the equipment into the tiny scary elevator and headed to the basement of the church. We are so lucky this year that we were able to borrow the commerical kitchen of the church for the day so we could extract our honey. Due to food safety laws, if you plan to sell honey, you must extract it in a commercial kitchen to be in compliance with food safety laws. Yes, there are ways around this, and many people cannot afford a commercial kitchen setup. We were very lucky that we were able to use these really nice facilities.
I immediately got to work washing up equipment in the wonderful commercial dish wash station (I want one of those faucets at my house, it was AWESOME!).
Meanwhile, the guys assembled the rest of the equipment and set it up assembly line style so we could move quickly through our tasks.
By 9 am we were up and running. The process was much the same as last year, except we were not packed into my tiny kitchen, nor were we battling bees as we came in and out of the house. Step one: use the hot knife to cut the wax caps off of the frames.
Step 2: use a pokey tool to open any cells that were missed by the knife (yes, Dr. Aaron came back, and his wife brought snacks!)
The frame are then loaded into the centrifuge and the honey is spun out.
The honey is then poured into buckets.
One other fun thing about using the church kitchen is that we were able to invite anyone who was interested to come watch (and help). All told, we had 15 people there for a while.
The kids played with puzzles and made forts under the tables and were captivated watching our tiny portable DVD player.
This step of the honey extraction process ended with empty supers carried back up the stairs and many very heavy buckets. We finished up about 4 pm and were all exhausted and sticky after a hard days work.
The next step (the next day!) meant that hubby carried those same buckets BACK down the stairs and filled all our honey jars.
At the church, we met up with our other beekeeping friend, who was able to borrow the extraction equipment from another bee keeping friend.
We loaded all the equipment into the tiny scary elevator and headed to the basement of the church. We are so lucky this year that we were able to borrow the commerical kitchen of the church for the day so we could extract our honey. Due to food safety laws, if you plan to sell honey, you must extract it in a commercial kitchen to be in compliance with food safety laws. Yes, there are ways around this, and many people cannot afford a commercial kitchen setup. We were very lucky that we were able to use these really nice facilities.
I immediately got to work washing up equipment in the wonderful commercial dish wash station (I want one of those faucets at my house, it was AWESOME!).
Meanwhile, the guys assembled the rest of the equipment and set it up assembly line style so we could move quickly through our tasks.
By 9 am we were up and running. The process was much the same as last year, except we were not packed into my tiny kitchen, nor were we battling bees as we came in and out of the house. Step one: use the hot knife to cut the wax caps off of the frames.
Step 2: use a pokey tool to open any cells that were missed by the knife (yes, Dr. Aaron came back, and his wife brought snacks!)
The frame are then loaded into the centrifuge and the honey is spun out.
The honey is then poured into buckets.
One other fun thing about using the church kitchen is that we were able to invite anyone who was interested to come watch (and help). All told, we had 15 people there for a while.
The kids played with puzzles and made forts under the tables and were captivated watching our tiny portable DVD player.
This step of the honey extraction process ended with empty supers carried back up the stairs and many very heavy buckets. We finished up about 4 pm and were all exhausted and sticky after a hard days work.
The next step (the next day!) meant that hubby carried those same buckets BACK down the stairs and filled all our honey jars.
Hi Honey! Honey Processing 2011-- in the beeyards
We extracted honey a little early this year, on July 4th, 2011. In summary, 2011 was an amazing year for our bees! We extracted over 5 gallons of honey, that is about 150 pounds of honey. We were also able to do a lot of outreach and education. For every part of the extraction process, we had an eager audience. What fun.
Part I: On Saturday July 2nd, we pulled the supers off of the hives we have in Bells. These bees are pretty much neglected most of the year, add in our not-so-textbook methods of saving comb from the bee removals and the mis-mash of equipment we own and the result was that the inside the hives was a mess.
Hubby did some much needed cleanup (scraping off burr comb, cleaning out dead out hives, and removing the comb from long forgotten inside feeders), I helped wherever I could.
There are two remaining hives in Bells (we lost two over the winter). Inside the hives we were happy to find that there were almost ZERO pest problems, no visible mites, no wax moths, and no small hive beetles. The bees had completely ignored certain frames, and overfilled others. Brood was present in several layers of the box, but we did not use queen excluders in this case so that is our fault. Despite the messy condition of these 2 hives, we were able to pull off 13 strong frames of honey.
Our kids and grandma and grandpa watched happily from the air conditioned cab of their truck. We did learn that working the bees in this bee yard is wonderful in the late afternoon, the tall cedars to the NW of the hives made for some very welcome shade while we worked.
Part II
Sunday afternoon, we worked the hives at our home in Farmers Branch. We had an eager helper from our church who wanted to learn more about bees. Ha ha, ask us to teach you about bees and we'll put you to work... nothing like hands on education!
Dr. Aaron got all suited up and watched in fascination as hubby worked his way through the hives.
Also watching (from the comfort of my air conditioned sewing room) were his wife and daughter.
After just a few minutes of working in the stiff, hot gloves, Dr. Aaron got brave and decided to go gloveless, just like us.
Four more hives worked and no stings, hooray!
Here is our haul the night before we processed. 7 supers nearly full of frames. I think we had 63 frames total. The stack of supers was nearly as tall as I was... and yes, we stored the supers in the house for over 24 hours before processing. We were very careful to get each and every bee out of the supers so it turned out to be a fairly safe way of doing things. If we had left these sweet smelling supers outside, the bees would have swarmed them trying to get at the 'all you can eat' honey buffet hidden inside. Inside the house, the supers were shielded from curious bees.
Part I: On Saturday July 2nd, we pulled the supers off of the hives we have in Bells. These bees are pretty much neglected most of the year, add in our not-so-textbook methods of saving comb from the bee removals and the mis-mash of equipment we own and the result was that the inside the hives was a mess.
Hubby did some much needed cleanup (scraping off burr comb, cleaning out dead out hives, and removing the comb from long forgotten inside feeders), I helped wherever I could.
There are two remaining hives in Bells (we lost two over the winter). Inside the hives we were happy to find that there were almost ZERO pest problems, no visible mites, no wax moths, and no small hive beetles. The bees had completely ignored certain frames, and overfilled others. Brood was present in several layers of the box, but we did not use queen excluders in this case so that is our fault. Despite the messy condition of these 2 hives, we were able to pull off 13 strong frames of honey.
Our kids and grandma and grandpa watched happily from the air conditioned cab of their truck. We did learn that working the bees in this bee yard is wonderful in the late afternoon, the tall cedars to the NW of the hives made for some very welcome shade while we worked.
Part II
Sunday afternoon, we worked the hives at our home in Farmers Branch. We had an eager helper from our church who wanted to learn more about bees. Ha ha, ask us to teach you about bees and we'll put you to work... nothing like hands on education!
Dr. Aaron got all suited up and watched in fascination as hubby worked his way through the hives.
Also watching (from the comfort of my air conditioned sewing room) were his wife and daughter.
After just a few minutes of working in the stiff, hot gloves, Dr. Aaron got brave and decided to go gloveless, just like us.
Four more hives worked and no stings, hooray!
Here is our haul the night before we processed. 7 supers nearly full of frames. I think we had 63 frames total. The stack of supers was nearly as tall as I was... and yes, we stored the supers in the house for over 24 hours before processing. We were very careful to get each and every bee out of the supers so it turned out to be a fairly safe way of doing things. If we had left these sweet smelling supers outside, the bees would have swarmed them trying to get at the 'all you can eat' honey buffet hidden inside. Inside the house, the supers were shielded from curious bees.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
August Summary
Wow, what a cheater post, the last day of August and I'm gonna shove as much stuff into one post as I can. This blog started as my garden record, and my 2010 garden was pretty disappointing. Good thing we have so many other hobbies I can occasionally write about.
Here's a fun one: dead animals. I found yet ANOTHER dead opossum in our yard, this is #3 for the summer.
We suspect that there was at least one more in the tall grass near the bees, because it smelled so bad. I never got close enough to verify. Three (or four) dead opossums in one summer is pretty odd, considering we've never seen a single one in the six years we've lived here (six years, really?). It could be that they are coming in for the dog food, or possibly they are coming for the bees. Who knows.
Here is all that is left of opossum #2
Just a jaw bone.
Opossum #1 was hauled off by the trash man. I was a bad homeowner and just left the other two to nature to deal with.
I saw this weird bee in my garden in August, he was eating something. I got closer and saw he was eating one of our honey bees!
I'll have to do some research to figure out what he is and if he's a threat.
My Jerusalem artichokes bloomed a bit. These poor things have been relocated so many times that they are everywhere in my yard and garden now.
I was surprised to find that my carrots had done great this year, despite being totally neglected.
The largest one was the size of one from the store.
Here's a fun one: dead animals. I found yet ANOTHER dead opossum in our yard, this is #3 for the summer.
We suspect that there was at least one more in the tall grass near the bees, because it smelled so bad. I never got close enough to verify. Three (or four) dead opossums in one summer is pretty odd, considering we've never seen a single one in the six years we've lived here (six years, really?). It could be that they are coming in for the dog food, or possibly they are coming for the bees. Who knows.
Here is all that is left of opossum #2
Just a jaw bone.
Opossum #1 was hauled off by the trash man. I was a bad homeowner and just left the other two to nature to deal with.
I saw this weird bee in my garden in August, he was eating something. I got closer and saw he was eating one of our honey bees!
I'll have to do some research to figure out what he is and if he's a threat.
My Jerusalem artichokes bloomed a bit. These poor things have been relocated so many times that they are everywhere in my yard and garden now.
I was surprised to find that my carrots had done great this year, despite being totally neglected.
The largest one was the size of one from the store.
Honey Extraction 2010
We extracted our honey the last Saturday of July, 2010. We were able to borrow extraction equipment from a friend at church (in exchange for extracting his honey too), and we also got together with another bee keeping buddy to all extract together.
First step, steal the honey. This does not make the bees very happy. Hubby was able to travel up to Bells late on Friday night to get the frames with honey from our four hives up there. On Saturday morning he removed the frames with honey from our five hives at home.
I tried to prepare the kitchen for easy clean up. Tried. I taped a plastic table cloth down on our kitchen table, tucked the curtains up out of the way and moved all the chairs and other stuff out of the kitchen.
Here is the finished set up. We tried to keep a logical flow to the order of things to minimize having to move drippy frames of honey too far. You can see just outside the kitchen window is a stack of medium supers, these came from three different families (and four different bee yards).
Just inside the door we set up a place to stack the supers we were working on.
This is what the surface of one of the frames of capped comb looks like.
Next was the decapping station. Where we used a hot electric knife to cut the wax caps off of the comb to expose the honey.
If done right, the wax comes off in a pretty curl.
The uncapped frames were then loaded into the centrifuge (is this this right name? maybe called and extractor?). This held three frames of honey and had an electric motor to spin the frames and force the honey out of the comb and onto the bottom of the vessel.
This picture is looking down into the cylinder of the extractor as it spins and the honey is flung out.
After several sets of frames were spun, we opened the valve at the bottom of the centrifuge and the beautiful golden honey poured out.
The honey was strained through a series of filters to remove wax and bee parts, then it was held in a 5 gallon bucket with a tap at the bottom.
Repeat. Over and over and over until all of the honey was extracted.
Poor hubby got the job of going outside to retrieve the next super full of frames. The bees very quickly learned where their honey had gone and were frantically trying to steal it back.
Hubby was careful to open and close the door to the kitchen quickly to avoid getting too many bees in the house.
After a few hours, the bees outside the door were overwhelming and hubby had to make a quick dash around the yard holding the frames to try and keep the bees from following him into the house.
This is a cluster of bees drinking the honey that is leaking out of one of the supers on the outside table.
Finished product! We ended up extracting about 12 gallons of honey for the three families.
Here are the bees cleaning off the outside table after we were done extracting.
Within an hour they had lapped up the giant puddle of honey.
The house was fairly easy to clean up, not as easy as just letting the bees do it, but not too bad. I'm still picking bits of wax off of my floors, and my floors were sticky even after two moppings.
In review, this year was just so-so for honey. As first year beekeepers, we are thrilled to get any, but still, we were hoping for more.
Comments and Lessons Learned:
1) We made a mistake and did not use queen excluders on our hives. This meant that the queens in nearly all of our 9 hives moved up into the supers and started laying eggs. Commercial beekeepers typically do not use queen excluders, so we hoped to get away with it to. Nope. Because of the eggs and brood present in the supers, we had to be extra careful to only pull frames that were just honey. Ideally, the whole super would have been filled with honey, no eggs. While this is a mistake in terms of how much honey we got, it is also a happy accident as it will mean our hives should be much stronger next year since they were able to raise so many more babies.
2) The honey was DARK this year. In general, a lighter honey is more desirable, but the comments from the Collin County Hobby Beekeepers association was that all the honey seemed dark this year. It still tastes great to us.
3) We needed more buckets and containers cleaned and ready to go before we started. We ended up having to pour honey bucket to bucket a few times unnecessarily.
First step, steal the honey. This does not make the bees very happy. Hubby was able to travel up to Bells late on Friday night to get the frames with honey from our four hives up there. On Saturday morning he removed the frames with honey from our five hives at home.
I tried to prepare the kitchen for easy clean up. Tried. I taped a plastic table cloth down on our kitchen table, tucked the curtains up out of the way and moved all the chairs and other stuff out of the kitchen.
Here is the finished set up. We tried to keep a logical flow to the order of things to minimize having to move drippy frames of honey too far. You can see just outside the kitchen window is a stack of medium supers, these came from three different families (and four different bee yards).
Just inside the door we set up a place to stack the supers we were working on.
This is what the surface of one of the frames of capped comb looks like.
Next was the decapping station. Where we used a hot electric knife to cut the wax caps off of the comb to expose the honey.
If done right, the wax comes off in a pretty curl.
The uncapped frames were then loaded into the centrifuge (is this this right name? maybe called and extractor?). This held three frames of honey and had an electric motor to spin the frames and force the honey out of the comb and onto the bottom of the vessel.
This picture is looking down into the cylinder of the extractor as it spins and the honey is flung out.
After several sets of frames were spun, we opened the valve at the bottom of the centrifuge and the beautiful golden honey poured out.
The honey was strained through a series of filters to remove wax and bee parts, then it was held in a 5 gallon bucket with a tap at the bottom.
Repeat. Over and over and over until all of the honey was extracted.
Poor hubby got the job of going outside to retrieve the next super full of frames. The bees very quickly learned where their honey had gone and were frantically trying to steal it back.
Hubby was careful to open and close the door to the kitchen quickly to avoid getting too many bees in the house.
After a few hours, the bees outside the door were overwhelming and hubby had to make a quick dash around the yard holding the frames to try and keep the bees from following him into the house.
This is a cluster of bees drinking the honey that is leaking out of one of the supers on the outside table.
Finished product! We ended up extracting about 12 gallons of honey for the three families.
Here are the bees cleaning off the outside table after we were done extracting.
Within an hour they had lapped up the giant puddle of honey.
The house was fairly easy to clean up, not as easy as just letting the bees do it, but not too bad. I'm still picking bits of wax off of my floors, and my floors were sticky even after two moppings.
In review, this year was just so-so for honey. As first year beekeepers, we are thrilled to get any, but still, we were hoping for more.
Comments and Lessons Learned:
1) We made a mistake and did not use queen excluders on our hives. This meant that the queens in nearly all of our 9 hives moved up into the supers and started laying eggs. Commercial beekeepers typically do not use queen excluders, so we hoped to get away with it to. Nope. Because of the eggs and brood present in the supers, we had to be extra careful to only pull frames that were just honey. Ideally, the whole super would have been filled with honey, no eggs. While this is a mistake in terms of how much honey we got, it is also a happy accident as it will mean our hives should be much stronger next year since they were able to raise so many more babies.
2) The honey was DARK this year. In general, a lighter honey is more desirable, but the comments from the Collin County Hobby Beekeepers association was that all the honey seemed dark this year. It still tastes great to us.
3) We needed more buckets and containers cleaned and ready to go before we started. We ended up having to pour honey bucket to bucket a few times unnecessarily.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Motivational Posters
After a discussion with hubby regarding a quote he loved, I knew I had to create a motivational poster for him. I found a site several years ago (2007) that was perfect for doing this sort of thing and I was so pleased to find it is still in existance. www.bighugelabs.com it is totally free, but memberships are available for a faster, no ads version.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Are bees dangerous?
Pardon the tacky attire, but it was 95 degrees in the shade and I was weeding in full sun. Right next to three bee hives... in shorts and a tank top... with roughly 120,000 flying stinging insects about 18 inches from me (we assume about 40k bees per strong hive).
No, bees are really not dangerous, this has been a wonderful thing to learn since we started keeping bees. Bees have moods, and sometimes you don't wanna mess with them, but 99% of the time, they are so peaceful and quite happy to just go about their business.
I would not recommend just walking up to any old hive without gear, but I've learned that our three are very docile. I did not intentionally start weeding practially nekked next to these gals, I was just working my way along the flowerbeds and realized I was in the bee yard.
No, I did not get stung, although, I got bumped a few times when I accidentally threw a dirt clod and smacked a hive. Bees 'bump' by flying into your body, kind of like a tiny airplane accident at chest level, it is their way of politely saying "what the heck are you doing you big dumb human?"
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