Mid Summer Bee Update

The "flow" is over.  In our area, when the Chinese tallow trees bloom, things kick into overdrive in the hive.  Bees are bringing in nectar and honey production is on!  We had one major problem this year.  A drought!  It rained less 0.3 of an inch in June.  The grass stopped growing.  Plants stopped flowering.  Things slowed down in the hive.  Trouble in Beeville, indeed.

We began fervently praying for rain.  Not only does it affect the bees, but our cows, goats, and chickens enjoy fresh, green, tender grass growth.  I reluctantly rolled out the last round bale we had from last year.  I was rationing it for a special occasion - sort of an emergency pantry, you might say.  Well, this is it.  The cows promptly ate it in less than a week.

An experienced beekeeper friend stopped in for a visit and wanted to check in on the hives to see how they were doing.  Good idea!  We opened the two boxes and inspected.

I'm not too big of a man to admit when I make mistakes.  I made one.  The 'super' is the box that you put on top of the deep brood box on the bottom.  Really, you want to add the super once your bottom box gets 80% full.  If it gets too full, the bees could leave.  We didn't want that to happen, so we added a super.  It was too soon.  The bees moved up.  So now they are in the middle 3 or 4 frames of the bottom box and the middle 2 or 3 frames in the top box.  The other frames haven't been built out yet.  

We did see capped honey, pollen, eggs, larvae, and capped brood.  The colonies are healthy, yet small.  It is for this reason that we may not pull any honey this year and simply allow the size of the colony to grow.  I can get honey from my friend in exchange for labor when I help him pull honey from his boxes.  Sweet!

One note of bad news before we move on.  The colony of bees that live in the column on the side entrance of our home is gone.  They have been there for years and years.  On certain years they have left, but always another swarm eventually moves in.  We're hoping the same thing happens again.

In our little herb garden, we allow the herbs, like mint, dill, and parsley, to flower and go to seed.  Here is a honey bee on the parsley.  Busy as  a bee.

As I looked across the garden, I spotted more honeybees that had made a bee line for the dill that was flowering.

They are working hard!  One more thing I wanted to show you.  When you work your bee boxes, you have to use your hive tool to break the glue-like material (propolis).  It is made of bee saliva, beeswax, and material bees get from plants.  They use it to make a sealant.  It has great health benefits.

When you break the boxes apart, most of the time, you break open honeycomb, exposing the sticky sweet goodness.  The bees don't like it much that you've broken apart their home and have disturbed their food.  They gather around it to pick it all up and to repair their broken home.  Pretty neat photo below of them circled up around the honeycomb.

The trouble with this is that if you left it alone, when you go to put the boxes back together, you'd crush these ladies.  We don't want to do that.  So, we use the hive tool to scrape the honey and the comb off of the frame and put it in a cup.  When you walk far enough away from the hive, the bees will leave.  At that point, you can take off the suit and enjoy a nice sweet snack of honey and comb.