Bees at Work

I saw this great photo on flickr with a bee sitting on a purple flower getting nectar. How in the world did the photographer capture the moment? I am not that great...

Here is my pathetic attempt to capture the moment. I took some pictures of the entrance to the top bar hive. Maybe it's time to get a new camera. I had a very hard time getting a good shot of the small details...

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New Bees for Our Hive

I am so excited! Today we received a new swarm of bees to replace the bees that died over the winter. My husband prepared some sugar water this morning as a welcome cocktail for the new bees. The bees will live on the sugar water until they get used to their new home and figure out where to find food. They arrived traveling in the back seet of a pick-up truck. Our friends John and Jane ordered them from a supplier in California. Today John and Jane installed five different swarms all over town - spreading the bee love. We where happy to receive our share of 10,000 new pets.

This time around the queen bee was marked with a blue dot of paint, so we can keep taps on mom at all times. Can you see it in the picture? The queen comes in a small cage. The cage has a hatch that is closed with a piece of cork. Once the bee folks arrive at their new home, the cork is replaced with a piece of marshmallow. The little cage hangs suspended from one of the top bars/slats of the top bar hive. The bee queen remains there until the worker bees chew through the marshmallow plug. After a day or two the bees usually get the job done. Once the queen bee is freed from her little cage, the worker bees will be ready to serve and attend to her majesty. Pretty cool!

I am looking forward to watching our new friends comings and goings. Only a few more weeks till they start collecting pollen - looking like clowns in their big orange yellow pants. =)

Robbers in the Hive

Do you remember my post from last spring about bees and beekeeping? If not here is the link

http://germandolls.blogspot.com/2009/05/bees-in-our-backyard.html



I just thought I'd give you an update on our bee hive. Well, the news is not good. We had such a cold winter here that all the bees died. My husband checked on them a couple months back. He looked through the little window, and all he could see was piles of dead bees. We are not sure if the bees death was due to the nature of the hive (top bar hive). Normally this type of hive is used in Africa and warmer countries. Did we doom our poor bees by making them move into a house that was not well suited to this climate? I feel so bad for them.

Since we were on spring break last week, and it finally warmed up here, we did some gardening. I walked over to our hive, and found to my surprise that lots of bees going in and out. I asked my husband whether he was sure the bees were all dead. I was kind of hopeful he had been wrong...Well, it turns out that these were robber bees stealing our bees' honey.

So we quickly sprang into action and opened the hive to harvest the remaining honey. I did not take any pictures, because I found it too depressing. Also, we had to act fast to rescue what was left of our honey.

I spent most of last week processing the honey and beeswax. In the process I learned that the brood chambers did not contain all that much wax. When melting the brown sheets in a pot, I ended up with a thick glob full of dead bees and debris. Not so fun. On top of it I managed to get stung by one of the robbers who had made it into our house and attacked me as I was breaking the comb into pieces. Ouch! My finger is totally swollen today.

After all this work, I am left with two quarts of very delicious honey and 1.5 pounds of stunningly beautiful yellow beeswax. I made some granola with the honey. Now I need to go to the library and find some books on candle making...

Bees in our Backyard: Part II / Bienen in unserem Garten: Teil 2

Thanks to Lucky Pebble, I just remembered that I never told you what became of our bee project. Remeber the bees, my husband and I received as a birthday gift in April? Well, I am proud to say that they did not abandon the hive! They decided they liked it here and worked as hard as only bees can work. Sometimes I wonder if humans could solve the global warming problem if people worked on this project as hard as bees work on their projects...

We think the bee population in our top bar hive grew from around 10,000 bees to over 50,000.

Pretty cool , eh?

Along the way we did encounter some problems. For some reason the bees did not build their combs straight down from the top bars. On some bars they built multiple "sheets" of comb at a slanted angle. You can see that in the closeup picture below. There really should just be one comb per bar. This sort of messed things up because we were not able pull the bars straight up and out. The crooked "sheets" of comb needed to be cut because they were stuck together in places. In the process we had some loss of life and honey. Very frustrating.

Why are the bees building crooked comb? Any beekeepers out there? Could it be because the hive itself is not sitting straight on the ground - but slightly angled? My husband rested the hive on a couple of benches from an old picknick table.

In the other closeup you can see some unfinished honeycomb. The cells are not closed or capped off. Apparently the bees decide when the honey is at it's best and put a lid on. We opened the hive twice over the last five months. I only have pictures from the first event.

The uncapped honey was not very sweet and as tasty as the final product. The last time we opened the hive we got a few beautiful chunks of the most delicious honey comb. We did not take a lot. We want our pets to be able to survive the winter and continue their happy life in our backyard. We got ONE precious jar we will savor down to the last drop over the next few weeks.

Plus, I got some wonderful beeswas to seal the wood buttons for my doll clothes. I love our new pets. They stung only twice. Luckily the kids and I got off scott free...

Bees in Our Backyard

On April 19th my husband and I received a beehive as a birthday gift. A friend of us built it from scratch out of wood. The style of hive he built is called a top bar hive. Until I received this gift I did not know much about bees. Frankly, I was a little afraid of them. So were the children as you can see from the very skeptical look on my daughter's face....

From a library book we learned that this type of hive is quite common in Africa. Beekeepers like it because the bees build the honeycomb directly onto a set of slats/bars that lay across the top of the box. See pictures below.
This makes harvesting honey quite easy. You also get a lot more beeswax for making candles that way. I am thrilled by the idea of making candles. I think this would be a great activity to do with children in the cold winter months.


The first set of pictures shows the bees being put in their new home on the day of their arrival in our backyard April 19th.

The second set shows the hive less than a month later. Watching the bees every day, I came to a much better understanding of the phrase "busy as a bee". They are such cool animals. The children are very excited. Every day they run outside and check on the progress of our new pets. 10 000 of them... Contrary to what most people seem to believe, honey bees are very peaceful. Nobody in the family has been stung or bothered by them. They go about their work every day never paying any attention to us watching or even standing close by.






We even got a little lick of honey when we opened the hive. Yummy!

I will keep you posted on the first harvest!