There's the honey!

This little journey I’m on has twists and turns to match the windiest of roads, with ups and downs to match. In the spring of 2007 I was ready to start being a bee keeper. I ordered my supplies, the hive, frames, suit, smoker, and miscellaneous bee tools thru Dadant and sons who has been in business since 1863. I ordered my package of bees from R Weaver of Navasota, Texas also in business over one hundred years. I had a lot of experience backing me up. And I had Colleen Gardner from the Bamberger Ranch to advise me locally. I was ready to get started. I had selected a spot in a cleaned out Live Oak grove that would be shaded from the afternoon heat. I located a source of water about- a hundred and fifty yards away- a wild life water feeder. The bees arrived late, it was already hot, and getting hotter when they arrived in mid spring. R Weaver had problems with the brood (young bees) building up, and the bees were not ready to ship until later than they were requested. None the less I was happy to see the bees arrive. I installed them in their new hive and set about making sure they had supplemental food (sugar water) and available water to survive the heat. The bees struggled from the start, and I checked on them at least weekly for about 8 weeks. At the end of that time it was clear to me they were not going to make it. I held on to hope, but when I opened the hive at the end of June 2009, all were gone, the only things in the hive was a scorpion, and a cockroach. That says it all. I was bummed, but also determined. I would learn from the experience. I think the biggest mistake was using an in-hive feeder. Bees are susceptible to drowning because they can’t swim so they would get in the feeder and drown. I tried to devise ways to help the bees, floating a piece of Styrofoam covered by a piece of screen, but they drowned any way. I lost a lot of bees that way, but the weather was a big factor too. I re-grouped and got ready for the next year.  

The following spring I started over, installed a new hive and went thru the process again. I noticed a difference right from the start. These bees were more robust, active and just plain stronger. It sounds a little strange describing one bee being stronger than another but when you see them interact regularly it becomes obvious. I have learned a lot from watching the bees, they are amazing little creatures, but first some bee facts: the life span of the average worker bee, (female), or drone (male is about 6 weeks from the beginning of the larval stage to the end of its adult life, the queen can live for several years, and the other bees sense when the queen is getting weak, and they can reproduce another queen insuring the survival of the hive. A bee is an amazing creature, the things they communicate is astounding. If you stand at the hive entrance you will see incoming and outgoing bees. The hive entrance is only about a half inch tall, but the incoming bees which you can see from about 20 feet out zoom in, and hit the entrance with the precision of a fighter pilot landing on a carrier deck. Then the fun begins, they do a little dance at the hive entrance communicating things like where the water is, how far away it is, what’s blooming, where it is and what time of day is best to go there. All of this has been documented, so I’m not making this stuff up!   My little bees are happy, and in March of 2010 I installed a honey super with a queen excluder to start producing honey. The queen is bigger than the other bees,  the queen excluder is a screen that keeps the queen out of the honey super where the honey is stored. This way the brood is not mixed in with the stored honey. I am looking forward to a small harvest in late summer of 2010, fingers crossed. The harvest will be uncharted territory for me, but I’m doing a mental rehearsal to get ready. I want to minimize  the time I’m disturbing the hive, get in get the honey and get out with as little disturbance as possible. I want above all to be ready, so I studied up, made a list and checked it three times, watched videos on youtube, and played the tapes in my mind.

To pass the time I also put in a big ass granite gravel driveway that I call the long and winding road. It ties in with a gravel road I put in a few years back, and makes a very large loop around part of the BEE Ranch.

When late summer arrived I was ready to go. I borrowed a honey extractor from my friends at the Bamberger Ranch and went to work. I smoked the hive to calm the bee’s, I used a fume board to drive the bees out of the honey super so I could get the frames out and take them to the extractor. It all worked out and to my amazement I did not get stung. I’m on my second bee suit, and I think I have a system down that work well for me. Now it was time to see what I had. I started to uncap the frames I had selected; I only took the 3 frames that were the most full, leaving the rest for the bees to get thru the winter. I uncapped the frames one at a time and put them in the hand powered extractor which spins the honey out by centrifugal force slinging the honey against the sides of the extractor and draining to the bottom where it runs though a screen and and is ready to drain into a bottle. I had some bottles to store the honey in that I had saved, so off to work I went. Since this was a small harvest I was done in a few hours and  the next thing you know there’s the honey!

It is amazing stuff, my first harvest!