The New Bees Are Here!

We went and picked up the new bees Friday night in Lynnville.  We ordered two 3 lb. packages this year.  This is what the packages look like.  There is a can of sugar syrup in the middle of the box that the bees feed on while being shipped.

Here is a close-up of the bees in the box before installation in the hives.

Here is a frame of honey.  There was quite a bit left over from overwintering our bees last year.  I wish we would have harvested some instead of leaving it all for the bees...who ended up dying anyway.  Bummer.  We went ahead and left them in the hives for the bees to eat.  At least we don't have to feed them while they are getting established.

 Here are the two hives after we installed the bees.  There are always a few left in the box after you shake them in the hive, so we just sat the boxes by the entrance.  They eventually all went into their new home. 

We are hoping for a good year for honey...and that we will keep them alive this time!  Best part of the day...nobody was stung.  Spraying them with sugar syrup helped with that, I'm sure!

Bees and Trucks

Last year we started the season with two bee hives.  Sadly one died, but the other thrived.  We decided to leave the honey in the hive hoping the bees would survive the winter.  We checked them last week and they are very much alive!  Below is the hive.

This picture shows us feeding them some sugar to get them through to spring, when everything starts blooming and they can feed themselves again.

And, in other news the farm has a new dump truck.  We had a regular pickup that we sold because we thought we could get more use out of a dump box.  This one was scored on Craigslist for a pretty good deal.  It has a hitch so it can pull just about anything, plus we can haul just about anything...manure, compost, wood chips, mulch, rock for driveways and landscaping materials.  It has been well taken care of and looks good for a 1981 model.  That makes it vintage, right? 

Beekeeping Class

This winter we have been taking a beekeeping class and we are learning alot! It has been really interesting and we are hoping to expand our beehives this Spring. We had 3 hives on our farm last year (1 belonging to us and 2 others belonging to a friend) and we could really tell that they helped pollinate the garden. We saw bees all of the time and our yields for most things were good, even though we had a less than ideal growing season with our wet and cooler than normal Summer. The wet and cool weather also took a toll on the honey harvest. We were only able to harvest 3 pints of honey from our hive and our friend harvested around 150 lbs. ( I think) of honey from 4 hives. We have learned in our bee class that in a good year it is nothing to harvest 150 lbs of honey per hive! We are hoping to add 2 more hives to our 1 that we already have...and we are hoping for a Summer that is a bit warmer and drier! If all goes well, we'll have some all natural honey to sell!

Honey Harvest

I thought I would share some pictures of our recent honey harvest!

These are the guys from Busy Bee Acres, all suited up and ready to harvest honey.

This is honey from their box on our farm. See how it is FULL of honey. They set their's up at the very beginning of the season.

This is from our box that was set up later in the season. Quite a difference. They ended up getting 5 gallons of honey from 4 bee hives. We got 3 pints from our 1 bee hive. We are hoping to get another hive built over the winter, plus get them both set out early in the spring so we get a bigger honey harvest next year!

This is a picture of the smoker. The wood chips inside smoke to calm the bees and help keep them from stinging.

Thanks to Busy Bee Acres from Otley for all their help this year with the honey bees. It is something we are quite interested in and still learning about. Hopefully we'll have a great 2010 honey harvest!