Uncle Beth’s Home Grown Mead

May 12, 2016May 21, 2016 / lizbaessler / Leave a comment

Last November Kim and I started a gallon of mead with our bees’ honey. Since then I’ve been racking it occasionally but mostly forgetting about it. I discovered it again recently and declared it ready to bottle.

It was, like everything I make, extremely dry and boozy, so I back sweetened it with 1/4 cup of honey. Booziness aside, I’m very happy with it. It’s so different from the store honey mead and, dare I say it, better. I’d say it tastes richer and has a stronger honey base. There’s also a lot less of it. I’ve been free with the 5 gallon batch of mead, taking it to parties and pawning it off on friends, because 5 gallons is a lot to have of anything. One gallon, on the other hand, filled just 11 beer bottles. Beer bottles are perfect for gallon batches, because they can be portioned out more slowly.

They’re also perfect for my small homemade labels. Technically this was the prototype for the official label, but I think I like it more.

Happy as a Bee

May 10, 2016May 21, 2016 / lizbaessler / 3 Comments

I was pretty worried about the bees.

We moved them in on a cold, wet day, and the days after just got colder and wetter. We’d planned to peek in on them on Saturday, but because of the cold we pushed it back to Sunday, which was also cold. And wet.

It was a bad week for bees all around.

Despite the weather, we had to check on our queen. My parents were visiting, so my dad acted as photographer and my mom, to her credit, spent her Mother’s Day standing in the drizzle watching me play with bees.

I did make her brunch afterward.

The bad weather had me worried. I’d gone down the day after installation and didn’t see a single one. Normally after moving into a new home, the workers will fly around and around the entrance orienting themselves. The temperature was in the 40s, though, when no sane bee would leave her home. It made sense not to see them, but I didn’t like that I couldn’t.

I put my ear up against the side of the hive – I thought that if I could hear buzzing, I’d at least know they were alive in there. But I couldn’t hear a thing. I was prepared for the worst.

But I didn’t need to be! The bees are not only alive, they’re productive! They’ve already started drawing out comb!

The queen is alive and has been naturally released from her little cage. We spotted her crawling around on a frame.

They haven’t taken very much of the syrup – the jar was still mostly full. We’re not overly worried, though, since we started them with a few frames of pollen and honey from last year. It makes sense that they’d want to eat that before sugar water.

Since it was raining, we closed up shop as soon as we found the queen. One of these days it’ll be nice enough to do a real inspection. For the time being, we confirmed everything we needed to – the queen was free, she’d been accepted, and the workers were working. We put the syrup jar back in place and popped the lid on top.

I was down just this afternoon, and the bees were flying around happily. They weathered the storm and should have a warm, sunny week ahead of them.

If you’re in the garden, stop by and say hi!

From a safe distance, of course.

The Bees Are in Their Bee House

May 5, 2016May 5, 2016 / lizbaessler / 4 Comments

You heard it here first – the bees are hived and happy.

Early this morning the bees were in Georgia, their home state. Then they were loaded into the back of a truck and driven to Wood’s Beekeeping Supply and Academy, where we picked them up.

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Here they are! Three-thousand happy little guys. I’m just kidding – they just got shaken out of their hives to travel 2,000 miles to a cold, wet place. They’re probably far from happy.

These six in particular must have spent the entire trip clinging to the outside of the package.

The weather was threatening rain all day, and as luck would have it the heavens opened just as we picked our bees up. We wanted to get them in, though, so we worked very quickly. I poked some holes in the lid of my bee syrup jar. We turned it over, and after a few seconds of dripping, the vacuum seal held. The bees will be able to pull the syrup out when they want it, but it won’t just drip all over them.

Finally it was go-time. David grabbed the bees and we booked it over to the hive.

We set them up in our state of the art weatherproof environment.

And we set to work. Technically I was in charge of this installation, though Kim had my back. Using the hive tool I pried open the lid of the package and pulled out the syrup can. The bees travel with a can of syrup so they stay fed on the road. That’s why they’re so clustered around the top of the package.

With the can out of the way, I could get to the queen. She travels in a much smaller mesh cage with a handful of attending bees.

She has to be kept separate because the bees in her package aren’t actually part of her colony. Queens are reared separately and put into these cages with a few bees who’ve grown up with and know her. But the 3,000 others are miscellaneous bees from other colonies. They’re literally shaken into the package and given a queen at random.

Bees don’t take kindly to random queens – in fact they go out of their way to kill them. That’s the reason for the separate queen cage (that, and making her easy for us to find). If she weren’t kept physically separate from the strange worker bees, she’d be dead before they left Georgia. Give her a few days, though, and she can spread her queeny pheromones and adopt this new colony as her own.

The key is keeping her in the cage inside the hive, so the colony can’t kill her before they get used to her. The cage comes with a pre-drilled hole in the side, plugged up with a cork. We pulled the cork out to reveal a second plug made of candy. Bees can’t chew through cork, but they’ll jump at the chance to eat some candy. The process takes a few days’ time – just long enough for them to fall under the queen’s sway. By then the queen will have a clear path out of her cage and a hive full of loyal subjects.

I hung the queen cage between two frames in the hive by nailing the attached yellow ribbon to the top of a frame. You can clearly see our queen in the topmost circle with a big white dot of paint on her back.

The queen in place (you can see the yellow ribbon laid across the frames), it was time to dump everybody else into their new home. I took three frames out of the center of the hive body to make room. We sprayed the bees with some bee syrup to calm them down (because they focus their attention on grooming) and clump them together (because they’re really sticky). Since it was a cold day, we went very light on the syrup so as not to chill them.

Also to help the clumping process, I gave the package a gentle but firm whack against the deck to knock them all down onto each other.

And then I shook them out. That’s all it takes – a little bit of shaking and maneuvering, and the majority of them dropped out through that hole and into the hive.

I very gently replaced the frames (don’t want to squish the bees below!) and put the inner cover on. On top of the inner cover we placed a second deep hive body to surround the inverted bee syrup feeder (lifted up on pieces of wood to give the bees room to get to the holes) and the package. Not all of the bees came out, and they’d have a very bad time left out in the cold and the rain. We covered everything up with the telescoping outer cover and got out of there.

On Saturday we’ll go back in to check on the queen and make sure she’s been released and welcomed. If she hasn’t been released, we’ll let her out. If she hasn’t been welcomed, we’ll panic and try to find another queen.

Until Saturday, it’s all up to the bees. I hope they’re warm tonight.

Bee Syrup

May 3, 2016May 3, 2016 / lizbaessler / 4 Comments

The bees are coming tomorrow!

The dandelions and most of the trees are in full bloom here already, but it’s good to give the bees some low hanging fruit to eat, at least until they get settled in and draw out all their comb.

What I’m affectionately calling bee syrup is just white sugar and water, mixed together at a 1:1 ratio. To facilitate mixing, I’m boiling the water first.

And pouring it into a big old jar. This jar used to hold 4 lbs. of olives and is just the right size to hold 10 cups of water…

Mixed with 10 cups of sugar.

The solution that I got has a wonderful viscosity to it – check out those ripples that form in the wake of the spoon!

My bee syrup is made, and now I’m just waiting for it to cool. Tomorrow I’ll use a hammer and a small nail to poke a few holes in the lid. This way, we can turn the jar upside down and rest it on top of the frames in the hive. A vacuum seal formed by turning the jar over should keep the syrup from all leaking out of the holes at once – instead the bees will be able to draw it out through the holes when they need it. We’ll surround it with an empty deep hive body and put the lid on top to prevent robbing from other bees. Basically our hive tomorrow will have two boxes – one for bees and one for food.

I’m not putting any holes in the lid until I get this thing transported to the garden, though. Covered in syrup is no way to start a hive installation.

It’s Bee Time Again

May 2, 2016May 2, 2016 / lizbaessler / 4 Comments

I have good bee news and I have bad bee news.

The bad bee news is that our colony from last year is dead. They didn’t make it through the winter. On the first truly warm day of spring, I went down to the garden to check on them. They should have been flying all over, enjoying the sun and reorienting themselves.

They weren’t.

A few days later we got all suited up just in case and opened the hive.

It was totally empty!

There weren’t just dead bees – there were no bees. Honestly this was one of the best case scenarios (coming in at a long second to living bees). I was having horrible visions of thousands of dead bees rotting in the hive. Instead of a disgusting job of scraping bee slime out of the hive, we had pristine frames and a whodunnit on our hands.

Our screened bottom board had a few dead wasps on it, and our first thought was that the bees had been overrun by them. If that had been the case, though, there would have been bee corpses everywhere.

The wasps weren’t killers – they were just opportunists. They must have come in after the hive was abandoned to steal the remaining honey. An unoccupied hive is an amazing find if you’re a wasp, unless you’re this poor little guy, who somehow died in the act of theft.

My friends Will and David had come along, and we shed our veils and coats and did a thorough inspection of the hive.

In spite of the wasps, there were still patches of honey. One or two frames were still pretty heavy with it. We’ll put these in the hive to give the new bees a head start.

Some frames will not be going back in. When the colony disappeared, the wasps weren’t the only opportunists to set up shop. The wax moth is a particularly gross pest drawn to beehives. These moths lay their larvae in honey comb – when the larvae hatch they tunnel through the comb and leave behind this distinctive webbing. Their favorite food (because they are so gross) is the skin of bio material left behind in the cells when a baby honeybee emerges. They craw from cell to cell, gorging themselves on this skin.

A strong colony should be able to fight off wax moths without a problem. They’re mostly a hazard when you store used comb that’s full of tasty brood skin but unguarded by bees.

We found this webbing in a few of the frames. We won’t be reusing this comb, but we will save the wax. We gouged out the webbing (because who wants that?) and put the frames in our solar wax melter.

What else did we find? Nothing much. A single cell of hot pink honey. Maybe one bee went off the grid and harvested a melting Skittle.

A sad sight – a lone bee, about to be born but with no one left to take care of it.

And a gorgeous display of packed pollen in different shades.

So what happened to the bees? They didn’t starve, or freeze, or get murdered. If they had, we’ve have the bodies. Kim and I went to the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association meeting to talk to the experts, and the prevailing opinion is that Varroa mites are to blame.

Varroa mites are usually to blame when it comes to honeybee problems, especially here in the north where overwintering is so difficult as it is.

We didn’t treat aggressively enough for mites in the fall, so as winter wore on, the mites’ numbers increased. Bees with high mite infestation are much more susceptible to disease. Just like with everything else, bees’ attitude toward disease is very self-sacrificing. On a warm day, infected bees would have flown away from the hive to die, hoping to prevent the spread to other bees in the colony. But it was spreading anyway, and these sacrificial flights happened again and again until literally no one was left.

But I said I had good bee news, too, and I do! We’re moving on and learning from our mistakes, and we have new bees on their way! On Wednesday we’ll be picking up a package from Georgia – a little mesh box containing a queen and about 3,000 bees.

This will be the foundation for our new colony.

Big Time Syrup

March 22, 2016April 25, 2016 / lizbaessler / 3 Comments

To break up the day and get some extra culture in us, Ben, Phil, Will, and I went on a field trip to my cousin Tom’s professional maple syrup operation.

(If you have no sense of context, go read Maple Syrup on the Baessler Estate first. Or just accept the fact that my friends and I went to Pennsylvania to make syrup with my dad, and carry on).

My cousin Tom lives fifteen minutes outside of town on the ancestral family hill where the Perkinses, my mom’s family, have lived for generations. In the 1940s my grandparents bought this land (down the road from their own families’ properties) to start a dairy farm. Late in her life, my grandma sold the old farm to my cousin. The cows are long gone, but he uses the land to grow Christmas trees and make maple syrup. The old farmhouse (also gone) used to stand roughly where the sugar shack is.

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It’s actually directly over the house’s old hand-dug well, which they use to draw water for cleaning the equipment.

It’s also near these four old pine trees, planted by my four uncles when they were kids sixty-some years ago. My poor mom and aunt weren’t born yet and missed the tree boat.

My cousin Tom was off helping someone else with their syrup and couldn’t give us a tour, but my uncle (also Tom) gave us the rundown on everything.

The real star of the show is the reverse osmosis machine, made by the Amish of all people. The whole point of boiling sap is to release most of the water as vapor, leaving the sugar behind. Syrup is just very concentrated sap. Sap is just 2% sugar, though. There’s a lot of water to be removed, and the reverse osmosis machine can help.

Osmosis occurs when two liquids, one pure water and the other water with dissolved sugar, are separated by a water-permeable membrane. Water naturally wants to equalize the sugar concentration in the two liquids by flowing from the pure side to the sugar side and diluting it.

But wait, you say! Don’t we want concentrated sugar-water? Osmosis is just going to add more water to sap! We don’t want osmosis! We want the revers- oh.

Reverse osmosis inverts the process by applying a pressure to the sugar side and forcing some of the water backward through the membrane. What’s left on the sugar side is all the original sugar with a lot less of the original water, or something much closer to syrup.

There are practical limits to reverse osmosis, and you have to boil away the rest of the water to get to pure syrup concentration levels. It gets you a whole lot closer, though, and cuts hours off the necessary boiling time.

After going through the reverse osmosis machine, the highly concentrated sap is moved to the boiler. It’s a whole lot fancier, but at its heart it’s the same as my dad’s setup. The sap goes in the long, flat pan that runs the length of the boiler. (It’s the part with all the mechanisms sticking out of it).

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Underneath the pan is a wood-fed furnace that heats the syrup, just like with my dad’s operation.

After the sap has been boiled, it runs through a filter to clear out any debris that might still be floating around. It did come out of the woods, after all.

Next comes the finishing process, where the syrup is boiled in small, controlled batches. Big vats over a wood fire are good for the long haul, but getting it down to just the right concentration takes more precision.

Finally the syrup’s ready to be packaged. The machine on the left is the bottler, where bottles are filled one at a time by hand. The machine on the right is a candy maker, for crystalizing the syrup into maple sugar candy.

Depending upon the time of year or just how the trees are feeling, you can see different variants in the color of the syrup. These are samples they keep on hand to demonstrate the color difference.

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Better than that were the samples kept on hand to demonstrate the taste. Nothing was boiling that day, but there was enough leftover for us each to get a shot glass of syrup.

It tasted amazing. I was told I should shift my beer brewing to syrup making, since syrup “actually tastes good.”

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After checking out the machinery, we went on a broader tour. This is the cross section of a sugar maple that a neighbor cut down, purely by coincidence, in just the right spot to reveal old tree tappings. The tree continued to grow, but the drilled holes stayed exactly where they were. If this tree is 135 years old, it must have been tapped… what? 40 years ago? 50?

Long ago as it was, the detail is still so sharp. You can clearly see the point from the tip of the drill bit. You can only sort of see, but we could feel very well, the grooves along the length of the hole where the drill turned.

We wandered the grounds a little to see what else was going on. Another of my uncles, Jim, is an avid beekeeper, and he’s getting my cousin Hannah – the daughter of syrup cousin Tom – into it. (Afterward Will said he’d never heard so many family members’ names thrown around in a single conversation).

Hannah has four hives – the red one is a split, or one colony in the process of being separated into two. She may not have to deal with angry neighbors like we do in the city, but she has her own problems – the whole area is wrapped in electric fence to keep the bears away.

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Hannah also keeps chickens, and as we were leaving my aunt Marsha slipped me a dozen eggs to take to my parents.

I was also slipped a bottle of syrup, so in exchange I’ll do a shameless plug. If you’re ever in Northeastern Pennsylvania, please go see my cousin Tom at Stone Crop Farm for maple syrup and Christmas trees!

The syrup is 100% pure and 100% from the land of my ancestors. What more do you need?

Honey Take Two

November 10, 2015November 10, 2015 / lizbaessler / Leave a comment

Everything’s coming up bee.

We went into the hive recently to check on the state of the honey box, and we were shocked to see that it was almost full. These bees are not playing games when it comes to preparedness. It’s bad news for the impending winter, but it’s good news for honey!

We threw in a triangle board and a shim and waited a few days. In that time the bees not only abandoned the honey box, they also set to work on filling in the shim with comb. I’ve been reading a lot about Bee Space lately. It’s the distance we leave between frames so we can pull each out individually without ripping through comb. About a centimeter, it’s the magic distance at which bees won’t fill things in. Bees are all about filling things in – any less than a centimeter is patched up with propolis to prevent drafts. Any more than a centimeter, as we can see here, is fair game for expansion and will be filled in with comb. They built all of this over the course of a weekend. Bees don’t get time off.

We made off with the honey box, just like last time. With all that burr comb we had to break apart to get inside, though, this theft was a little messier. Some of the equipment got sticky, and the bees were wise to it. As I was putting out the smokers, this little guy was frantically cleaning up a thumbprint of honey.

Soon after collecting the honey, we had one heck of a storm. The bees stuck it out like champs, but we were so afraid the hive would get toppled. The fact that we’d just removed the honey box and a foot of height may be what saved us. In order to sleep a little easier, we put up this windbreak. The hive is already nicely protected to the west by a picket fence, and the lattice is at an ESE angle that should break up any gusts coming up the river.

With the hive secure, we could turn our attention to more important things. Like honey! The bees had really done a stellar job collecting, and had filled and capped almost all ten frames.

There were, sadly, a few casualties.

We made sure to get another hot knife. It uncaps frames like a dream. I did drip a drop of honey from it onto my hand, however, and I got decent burn from it. I’m a little worried the heat may affect the quality of our honey…

Heat notwithstanding, the honey is gorgeous. It’s so dark and rich it’s impossible to see through. Here it is dripping its way through our filter. Only in the thinnest spots, with the light shining straight through, does it approach a color I might be willing to call “honey.”

We’re pretty excited about it.

The garden is pairing with a fabulous and very locally-driven restaurant for a cooking class later this month. Kim is speaking at the class and I, purely by chance, won two free tickets to it in the garden’s fundraising raffle. Some may claim nepotism. I’m claiming that I put close to $30 worth of tickets in the cup. I also put my blood sweat and tears into this class, meticulously filling twenty little 3 oz bears to be given as favors.

The honey is the most impressive when you look at it next to the batch we harvested in the summer. I have almost a full jar because I’m a hoarder and can’t bear the thought of it disappearing forever. Both jars were collected from the same hive in exactly the same spot, but two months apart: the jar on the right on August 10th and the jar on the left on October 12th. The difference is, as far as I know, purely floral. Spring and summer mean delicate light flowers like pea and squash blossoms, but late summer and fall mean rougher, darker flowers like Black Eyed Susans and sunflowers.

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Am I making all this up? Maybe. But whatever the reason, this honey is so dark it’s almost black, and it tastes, I swear, like elderflowers. The summer stuff was great, but this is a world apart.

Bee Update!

September 5, 2015September 5, 2015 / lizbaessler / 1 Comment

I said we weren’t going to mess with the bees.

I lied.

Or rather, once I said we weren’t messing with them, we realized it had been a while since we had messed with them.

So today we messed with them. We went in for a checkup more than anything. We want to monitor their progress and get a sense of if and when we can do another honey harvest.

So we opened up the top honey box to see if the hive had made any progress. And I, through thick gloves and sunglasses and face netting, managed to snap this completely centered and focused bee in flight. How did I even do this?We weren’t sure if they would have started storing in the new honey box or not. But they have! They’ve built the comb up in every frame and started storing honey in quite a few. These are the frames of the top hive body onto which they’ve built some little honey-filled burr comb extensions. Just like in those 2013 bottles, this late-season honey is noticeably much darker in color that the stuff we’ve already harvested. We tried a little bit, and I swear it tasted like elderflowers. Who knows. After exploring the honey box, we delved into the top hive body. Production down here is also at full throttle. These bees are exceptional. If I have my own hive someday, I’m gearing myself up for some serious disappointment. The capped cells stretching into the distance are brood – each one contains an egg or larva that will eventually be a worker bee. In the foreground and running along the right edge of the frame are drone brood, identifiable by their bumpiness. The drones are the only males in the colony and kept around only for breeding with neighboring queens. I could say something wry about men here, but I won’t.Instead I’ll show you this picture of the miracle of birth! Most of the bees in this picture are workers going about their business with their heads in the cells. To the far left of the frame, however, halfway down, are two bees coming out of their cells headfirst. These are drones emerging for the first time from the cells they were laid in as eggs. About four cells northeast of them is another drone a little behind in the process, still breaking through his wax cap. All you can clearly see are his antennae. In a by-and-large positive checkup, there was one ill omen: propolis. The stuff acts as a sealant, and while it’s perfectly natural for it to be here, Kim says the fact that it’s so prevalent and so thick this early in the season means the bees think it’ll be an especially hard winter. This is bad news for me, because I still haven’t gotten over last winter. And it’s bad news for the bees, because they have a heck of a time surviving the cold. Our colony last year didn’t survive. Neither did something like 40% of the colonies in Rhode Island. We love these bees, though, so we’re going to do our best to keep them alive. If we do take another batch of honey, we’re only taking half at the most. And I’ll be cooking up fondant and hopping the fence to feed them when the snow’s too deep to open the garden gate. Hopefully they make it!But for now the weather’s still warm and the bees are loving it. In fact, look who I found later in the flowers by my house! She’s not necessarily one of ours, but I’m choosing to believe she is.

We Did It!

August 14, 2015August 14, 2015 / lizbaessler / 1 Comment

Honey is here!

After giving the triangle board a few days to work its magic, we stole the full honey box right off the top of the hive. We got all suited up, lit two smokers, set the honey box in a wagon, wrapped it in a sheet, and booked it on out of there.

We needn’t have worried. The bees didn’t even seem to notice that we were making off with a month’s hard work, and the honey box was completely deserted. The triangle board could not have worked better!

Actually, it could have worked a little better. The bees who left late must have been tipped off that something was up, because some of the honey had disappeared. After a certain point, every bee must have taken a bellyful of honey when she went through the triangle board. It’s not a huge loss, though, and it’s likely just been moved to the next honey box. 20150810_141555

We brought the honey box back to Kim’s house and set to work spinning. I’d heard of “spinning honey,” but I’d never known what to picture and certainly didn’t think to take the term so literally.

When the bees declare a cell full of honey, they cap it off with a layer of wax. It’s almost as if they know what we’re up to and are trying to make it harder on us. To clear a path for the honey to slide out, we have to remove every single cap. For the first frame we used a tool that looked like a pointy afro pick to poke them out. For the next frame we tried out an electrically heated knife that came with the rental equipment. It was a lot more effective. It was like running a hot knife through butter. Except the butter was wax.

Once the first three frames were uncapped, we initiated the next phase. This contraption is the extractor itself. A tall cylinder with a hand crank on top, it’s a lot like an ice cream maker. Inside are three wire racks, each of which holds a frame. It’s like an ice cream maker with a rotisserie chicken cooker inside.

With the frames loaded up, it was time to spin. And spin is exactly what we did.

Turning the hand crank whirls the racks around and the honey, uncapped, gets flung out of the comb by centrifugal force. It hits the walls of the cylinder and slides down to collect in a reservoir in the bottom. I gave it 200 cranks in one direction, flipped the frames, and gave it 200 in the other direction. I threw in another 50 for good measure at the end. Honey

Here I am getting into the spirit of things.

Between the hot knife and the spinning, we got a nice two-man procession line going. Before long we had all nine frames extracted and were ready to move on to filtration. At this stage, the honey contains a lot of wax and more than a few stray bee parts. You gotta strain. Disastrously, our rental equipment was missing its filter! My huge brewing straining funnel stepped up to the plate, though, and performed admirably. You’d never even know it wasn’t part of the setup. 11872238_10206296204155550_5329416799319933996_o

We let the honey drain out of the extractor into the funnel, then through the funnel’s mesh into the bucket below. Honey doesn’t move fast, and the day took on a slower pace from this point forward.

When the extractor was empty, we could move the bucket and funnel mess up to the table and begin bottling into 1 lb and 1/2 lb jars. I also set aside three pounds to make into mead. 20150810_160935

We opened up a bottle of my previous batch of mead to sip while the honey drained. I have to admit, this honey has a richness to it that the store-bought stuff I’ve been using in my mead lacks. I’m so excited to brew with honey I’ve actually raised and harvested myself, but I’m afraid this will ruin me for the cheap and easy method.

So it goes.

I’m also becoming more aware of the tremendous range of flavor honey comes in. So many mead recipes I’ve read call for specific blossom varieties, a distinction I’ve never really taken to heart. I thought there might be notes of specific flavors that came through mainly to those who were looking for them. Kim and I sampled a few different honeys, however, and I was bowled over by how different each batch was. We tried a jar from our garden in the spring of 2013. (The last jar in existence, Kim said. There’s a dark finality in small artisinal batches, man). It tasted, for all the world, like flowers. Way beyond slight notes. 20150810_162330

Then we tried a jar from the fall of the same year. From color alone, you could tell something was different. It was dark. Almost brown. And it tasted, I swear, like autumn. It was smoky and so rich. I’ve never had honey like that.

Then we tried a store-bought bottle from the Caribbean that Kim had been given as a gift. She says once you become an acknowledged “bee person,” people start giving you honey stuff. I’m alright with that. This bottle was completely different. It was dark, but not thick. And while it was sweet, of course, it had a spiciness to it. It was almost hot. I’m not sure I’d put it on my granola, but it was fascinatingly different.

But enough of my poetic honey waxings. (Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be here all week).

All told, we collected about 30 pounds of honey. Not bad at all for just one month with the honey box! At this rate, we may very well get another harvest in. We’ll be selling the honey within the community garden and using the proceeds to offset bee costs.

Maybe buy a hot knife of our very own.

Robbing the Hive

August 11, 2015October 7, 2015 / lizbaessler / 1 Comment

The bees must be so confused. 20150808_110149

Soon we’ll be harvesting the nearly full honey box, so we’re taking care of a few things in preparation.

First we put together a new honey box to replace the one we’ll be thieving. A lot of last year’s honey box frames fell prey to a moth infestation, and rather than risk carrying any eggs over, we bought and constructed all new frames.

All bees need to get going is a nice hexagonal pattern. Really, they don’t even need that, since the hollows in old trees they might frequent in the wild don’t have anything quite so factory-perfect. It’s a good nudge in the right direction, though, and it encourages them to build in a way that keeps the frames easily extractable. 20150808_104829

This is what a frame looks like before the bees have their way with it: a big flimsy game of Q*bert.

A lot of beekeepers buy these sheets printed in plastic, but we’re going au naturel and using sheets printed in pure beeswax. After the frames have been used, we put them in a solar wax melter, and it’s much easier going if the whole thing just melts away without plastic getting involved.

With our new frames assembled, we opened up the hive. This time Kim let me do all the prying open and heavy lifting. I took off the cover and set aside the existing honey box. Here the bees are spilling up out of the top of the hive body and through the queen excluder among the burr comb they’ve built between it and the honey box. As you can see, I’m still rocking my stupid taped-up pants. They’re my bee pants now.

Rather than go poking around in the hive body, we set to work building up all our new layers. It’s all about getting in and out quickly before the bees get too aggravated. Our colony is outrageously good-natured, and every time we’ve managed to accomplish our goals before they get territorial. They’re so friendly, in fact, that I have yet to be stung.

Actually, I have never been stung. Ever.

The day might come that I learn I have a severe allergy, and that’ll be the end of an illustrious career. I hope not.

Anyway. We put the fresh honey box (the white one here) on top of the queen excluder. The lighter tan strip on top of the honey box is a shim. It’s just a wooden frame with a circular hole drilled into one side. To keep the bees from returning to the honey box, we have to close off the door that normally sits above it. The shim makes up for the lost airflow.

The thing I’m putting into place on top of that is a triangle board. Under that hole is a piece of mesh covering a series of wooden triangles. Here’s a good picture if that lame explanation meant nothing to you. It’s essentially a one-way bee maze: easy to get out of but hard to get back into. Finding her normal door closed, a bee makes her way through this maze and either out the shim hole or down into the new honey box. Ideally, this happens dozens of thousands of times until all the bees have evacuated.

On top of that we put the old, full honey box. And on top of that we put the lid with its door sealed. On top of that we put two cinder blocks to hold the whole thing down in case of heavy winds. It is very nearly my size now. I was fine disassembling and reassembling the hive. I wasn’t overcome by the weight of the honey or the swarm of bees. But when it came time to put the full honey box back on top, I couldn’t do it on my own. I was just too darn short to lift something that heavy and that full of bees that high.

I may or may not be allergic to bees, but I most definitely am and always will be five foot two, which might put an end to an illustrious career if bee hives get any taller than this.

I hope they don’t.

I’ve published this on the Fox Point Community Garden blog, too. Go check it out!

Liz Baessler

I have an MA in English and a lot of time on my hands.

bees