Our biggest harvest yet – 95 lbs of honey.

June 1, 2019 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

Spring was good to us with its profusion of blackberry blossoms which yielded hives full of pale and delicious honey. We put our daughter and her boyfriend, JI, in bee suits for the first time and had them smoking and brushing bees, which they greatly enjoyed. (I’m glad that I was the only one who got stung on their first excursion to the bee yard! I even restrained my remarks to the bee that crawled up my boot. )

We only checked honey supers above excluders and were still able to pull 95 pounds of honey. There are full supers with frames that were 3/4 capped last weekend, so we’ll have more to process in the near future.

As the workshop is still in disarray, we extracted the honey in the kitchen with the four of us working very well together in the cramped space. JI is a natural at decapping frames and we all took turns cranking the handle on the extractor. I’d covered the island with a sheet and put towels down on the floor, so clean up was a breeze. With water and electricity at the shop now, we were able to pressure wash the equipment. I even had enough energy left to pressure-wash the wood ware that I plan to repaint sometime this week. (Or do I mean next week? What day is it? I love summer break!)

The main nectar source right now appears to be elderberry, and the bees are still visiting buckwheat early in the day. I’m very happy to see them on the lavender, but I don’t yet have enough lavender for it to make a difference. I just read that varroa mites don’t like the way lavender smells, so lavender pollen and nectar can help protect bees. (Source: Plants for honey bees) That makes me want to go out and clip more cuttings right now, but I need to wait a while as the plants are currently in full bloom.

Honey May 2019 — My first attempt at lavender-infused honey.

I did cut some blooms a couple of days ago for my first attempt at making lavender infused honey. I know I need more, but I really want to leave as many flowers on the plant for bee-forage as possible. Some of the recipes I looked at require heating the honey, which I prefer not to do, so I am following a recipe from NectarApothecary.com that takes 4 – 6 weeks. I do not have dried blooms, so I know there’s a risk that fresh flowers will make the honey crystallize, but I’m not worried about that as I plan to add it to tea or simply eat it by the spoonful when I have a sore throat! I know I’m not supposed to disturb the honey, but I can’t resist taking the lid off to inhale the incredible aroma now and then. It’s only a matter of time before I dunk a teaspoon in, so there may not be much left in the jar by the end of the six weeks….

Today we get to find a home (other than the living room) for the Honey Keg and pour our liquid gold into it for storage and eventual easy bottling. I couldn’t find my mason jars and lids the other day, so it may be time to just have a case of pre-sterilized containers shipped in. Our previous process of ladling honey into jars in the kitchen sink is going to take too long, but I’m not going to complain about how much honey we have. After all, our progress means we’re one step closer to being able to retire from our day jobs!

It’s another beautiful day on the farm, and we finally have a chance of rain in the forecast. Cucumbers, grapes, blackberries, and tomatoes are all getting closer to being edible. We got to eat four incredible blueberries from one of the new bushes yesterday. The workshop passed the building inspection yesterday. Best of all — we no longer have to worry about what is going on with our old house and can now focus on framing the honey shop in the workshop. It just simply doesn’t get any better than this!

Lazer Creek Apiary · Products and Vendors · Supplemental Feeding

Preparing for Winter

October 22, 2017 Lazer Creek Apiary2 Comments

Enlgish Hive — English Hive – October 22, 2017

It’s only 62 degrees this morning, but bees in the English hive are already out foraging. It’s no wonder that these bees are well set up for the cold weather that is just around the corner; of all our hives, they have the most honey stored. This is our go-to hive for requeening because the colony has always been friendly, the queens have always been great producers, the bees are hygienic, and the bees are the first out the door to forage.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have a hive that has no stored resources despite all the goldenrod that surrounds the apiary. Our records show that they haven’t stored any resources since we brought them back from the sunflower patch — and they had nothing then. If I’d been able to find the queen yesterday, I’d have combined them with another weak but productive hive. Those guys have increased their numbers by a full frame of bees and they have nectar and bee bread stored. I can’t risk combining them without eliminating the lazy-genetics queen, so they have two weeks to pick up their game! We put a candy board on the hive yesterday (and reduced the entrance down to a single bee width), so maybe that will help them. Maybe it will make them more dependent on us.

We’ve also had to do our part in the preparation. Our varroa mite treatments were interrupted by the two hurricanes that passed close by, but we treated the last hives yesterday. We used Api Life VAR for most of the hives simply because it dissipates and doesn’t have to be removed. We used ApiVar for the last two hives simply because we still had some; we will need to remove the strips after 42 days. We’ve had good results with both products in the past and we do try to rotate treatment methods to prevent mite resistance.

A non-chemical way to break the mite cycle occurs when we requeen because the brood cycle is interrupted. Of course, this is not a method we can take at this time of year. Not treating for mites risks loss of the colony, so to us that is simply not an option. Many experts consider varroa mites to be the main factor in winter colony losses.

The other steps we taken to set our bees up for success are reduction the entrance sizes to help each hive better defend against robbing, removal of queen excluders, and removal of superfluous supers and brood boxes. As temperatures drop, we need to minimize the volume that bees need to keep warm. The queen is not going to lay large amounts of eggs at this time of year, so we only need to allow for enough space to store the last resources naturally available out there. Queen excluders need to be removed because the bees may cluster above the excluder, leaving the queen cold and alone and likely to die. While she’s not laying much right now, they’ll need her in spring! As for robbing — it’s not just other bees that rob. We found a yellow jacket inside one hive yesterday and I blogged about the European Hornets that decimated hives a few weeks ago.

The final thing we’re still battling is small hive beetle infestation. Some hives have almost none, while other hives are mind-mindbogglingly full. Naturally, the hives with the most nectar are most attractive to the beetles, so they got extra beetle blasters yesterday. Two of our hives are always the most problematic, so we’ll relocate those hives in spring to see if that makes a difference. Both have been requeened. Both used to be mean and are now calmer. Mean or calm made no difference in beetle numbers, so we suspect it’s location. Still, the other two hives on the stand have minimal beetle populations, so it’s going to be trial and error to figure out what’s going on with them.

Well, I want to get outside and enjoy another couple of hours among the trees before heading back to the city. We’ve finished all the crucial tasks, so now it’s time to just relax and enjoy — and tire the dog out before sticking her in the car for the 5 hour commute!

Bees · Gardening · Lazer Creek Apiary · Pests - Bees

Many Happy Returns

September 30, 2017September 30, 2017 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

If you read my blog from two weeks ago, you’ll know that at that time we did not have a single bee anywhere in our yard — not even on a feeder bucket. Well, we left the bucket out and on Thursday we found a handful of bees feasting away. There were a few more yesterday, and even more today. All of the foragers are young bees, which supports our premise that the old field force was killed off. The timing would be about right for nurse bees to have graduated to being foragers.

Another exciting thing about these bees is that there are some black bees mixed in with the regular Italians. Black bees have a reputation of being aggressive, but they are also known to be resistant to varroa mites. We would love to add some of those genetics to our bee colonies. Black bee numbers were decimated in the early 1900s by tracheal mites, and some thought they had been completely wiped out, but researchers have found some in Europe and in the United States. The ones on the bucket are certainly not aggressive as hubby and I have both coaxed some onto our hands to get a closer look. Of course, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be aggressive around their hive. We plan to leave feeders out over winter even though we don’t have any active hives in our yard. If we can support the local bee population, we are still achieving one of our goals. If we attract another swarm — well, that would be icing on the cake!

While I was watching the bees and listening to their happy buzzing, I noticed leaves on the Flame Azalea in our memory garden. This particular azalea was planted in memory of my aunt as its vibrant colors just reminded me of her. The plant is also a native plant, not a modern hybrid, and Aunt Joan was so very English in all the best ways. I’m not saying she was old-fashioned, because she wasn’t. She was an inspiration, multi-talented, and full of life. I know the azalea is just a plant, but I felt a sense of loss when it died. While I still thought about Aunt Joan every time I looked at the bare twigs (I couldn’t bear to dig it up), that didn’t cheer me up much! I am so happy to see new growth and am looking forward to next spring when it bursts into oranges, reds, and yellows again.

Without much hope, I thought that if the azalea could come back, maybe the Japanese Maple would too. Now this tree marks the resting place of our daughter’s cat, so it doesn’t have quite the emotional connection for me that the other plants in the memory garden have, but when it died, I felt like I’d let our daughter down. The last thing she needs to see when she walks over there is a dead twig! Lo and behold — new buds and one new leaf.

The idea of a memory garden started when a co-worker gave me tulip bulbs to plant in memory of my father. Tulips do not typically regenerate in the heat and the sandy soil of central South Carolina, but these tulips have returned every year. I enjoy seeing perennials pop back up every year anyway, but that joy takes on a different facet when it is combined with happy memories of those who were so loved so much.

The memory garden will be hard to leave behind when we finally move to the farm full time, but we are trying to root cuttings from all the shrubs to take with us. If that fails, we’ll buy new shrubs of the same kind to put in the memory garden we have already started down there. That garden already has English blue-bells and daffodils planted in it. It’s going to take some time to convince the summer weeds to stay out of there, but we’ll win that battle! My parents, Aunt Joan, and hubby’s parents all loved gardening. What better way to remember them all than to dig in the soil and create something beautiful?