I am very excited about introducing my daughter to the world of beekeeping.  I think it has so much of interest to little children, and some adults, who are often fascinated by the microcosms in nature. I have always loved things in miniature.

My aunt has a Victorian doll house and I can always remember staring into it when we would visit as a child. I loved the small details inside and imagined if I were transmorgified to fit inside, would it still be livable? Toy trains also have the same effect on me.

Later in life I would purchase my first own miniature civilization from the back of a comic book. The magical world of Sea Monkeys. Some of you may have no recollection of what a Sea Monkey is but they are nothing more than a type of newly hatched brine shrimp.  Of course the cover art on the comic book depicted castles, sea monkey children, parents, etc.  They come shipped to you in a small plastic packet of dried eggs that hatch once placed into water.  I remember filling my Kerr jar with salted water and watching the eggs hatch as I poured them in.  I was so excited to see them move around an imagined the castles they would build circled with roads, air balloons, and a fully functioning government. Alas, they began to smell and my mother sent them down the great porcelain whirlpool while I was away at school.  It’s too bad because my dad had even bought me a race track that you could make them swim in.

Again a few years later my grandfather and my cousins put together our own ant colony using wood and Plexiglass.  After a week or so, tunnel networks could be seen running through the rectangular shape bio-rectangle. It was sort of like an observation hive with dirt.  I loved it.

I guess it is only natural that beekeeping would be the next step.  Altough I doubt my wife will allow me to put an observation hive in our house, but wouldn’t it be cool.

I ordered some supplies from Dadant and Brushy Mountain Bee Farm.  The suit will last my daughter until she is about 7 or so. I have to tie a belt around the pants to hold them up and the gloves simply look ridiculous. She looks like a miniature astronaut with seal arms.  But I was just thrilled she did not flip out with it on.  I got her her own brush, hive tool, frame gripper and a little wooden carpenters box to put her tools in.

She is all ready to go once the bees come in late April. The only thing I am worried about are the stings. I have told her there is always the chance that she could get stung but with all of the clothing she will have on hopefully there will be no such incidents.  The only other issue is allergies. I feel that because my daughter was born in China and raised there a year as an infant that she has super immunities. So far she has demonstrated no reaction to any kind of nut, bread, and even dairy.  I know with bee stings there is no reaction until after the second sting. I think with the first one your body decides if its histamines are going to go bonkers from the toxin. The next sting. Nothing will happen or you will start to show a reaction.

This week I plan on going to the doctor for a health check up and while I am there ask if I can get an Epinephrine Pen for children, if such a thing exists. When we go to the hive I will also bring some anti-sting numbing agent that is topical and have some ice in a water bottle.  It will all work out.

My daughter’s bee hive will be located on a new property.  This time a horse farm with lots of acreage. I have to confirm the owner realizes that next to bears and humans, horses are the next object of target fixation by a honeybee.  I think it is because horses are not only big and hairy like a bear but also sweat like a human which I have found aggravates the bees.

Thanks for reading.  My next post will talk about the new extractor I bought to replace the junko-matic 2000.

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Hello all. Long time no write. I know. Is life an excuse?  Probably not but it is all I have to offer for not posting more. Basically I ignored my blog for the whole entirety of 2011 but since 2012 is the last year before the Mayan calendar implodes I thought I should write down my final thoughts about beekeeping to be stored somewhere in the I-Cloud.

Last year was a pretty good year for my most of my bees. As many of you know I have three hives on about 500 acres of someone else’s land. It sits across a farm plot managed by organic farmers and is fairly isolated from prying eyes.

During the 12 or so years I have been keeping bees  I have primarily followed the traditional route of managing a hive using all sorts of chemical treatments, antibiotics, miticides, essential oil massages, vitamins, and positive thinking to keep my bees healthy. It worked well enough but turning your hive into a biological storage facility for DOW Chemical products is not what I had in mind when I started beekeeping.  It should be idyllic. Warm sunny afternoons with the smell of hemp, (the legal kind), burning in your smoker and the soft sound of bees humming in their hive as they diligently work to produce liquid gold.

I decided I wanted to have that beekeeping experience rather than the other one.  To that end, I decided I would no longer treat my bees with any sort of chemical or oddball treatment method that would turn my hive into a Rube Goldberg device of integrated pest management.  I would rely solely on the genetic attributes of bees to solve their own problems. Survival of the fittest as we say outside of the circles within the Creation Museum.

I needed bees that were bred to be resistant to the onslaught of mite-oligical imports from Asia.  I worked before with the Buckfast bees and they were great to manage and were also resistant to the Tracheal mite.  The Varroa mite, not so much.  After searching the all-knowing “Google” I arrived upon a breeder in Texas known as BeeWeaver Apiaries.  They sell a breed of bees called “Bee Weaver” which are a hybrid “of our very best All Star and Buckfast and BeeSMaRt colonies. “

These bees have proven during the last 2 years to be almost bullet proof in their resistance to disease and mites.  I have not treated them with one iota of treatments and they have so far thrived.  The colonies are strong and have over wintered well according to my last check a few days ago.  With our warmer than usual February they have already started laying and are bringing in loads of pollen to start the season.

The only downside to these gems is their disposition. If you want to learn to keep bees,  I might suggest working  with the Buckfast variety instead.  I believe their ability to fight off everything short of kryptonite has made them a little more tenacious than your average Italian honeybee.  When I enter the field to work on them I am sure to hermetically seal my suit because when they get agitated, and they will, you will know it.  When I leave the field, I need to walk about 300 yards before the last one of them has stopped trailing me.  They are defensive with a capital “D”.

This year I plan on introducing my daughter to beekeeping and I aim to start her off on bees that are easy to work with, like the Buckfast. This may mean I have to treat them however it is a fair tradeoff so that my daughter has a pleasant experience and not the nightmare scenario I can see in my head with the other bees.

Part 2 Coming Soon.

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Holy crap. Has it really been that long since I wrote last?  Life has been zooming by at near light speed during the last few months.  After almost 4 months of having a tree land on our house we are nearly half-way through getting the work done. The outside looks trim and proper but the upstairs bathroom looks like hell.  Just last week they blew in all of this foam insulation into the rafters, as a result it looks like the Stay Puffed Marsh Mellow Man set himself on fire in our bathroom and stumbled all over the place.

I also just landed a new full time job as a Cartographer for SNL Financial, a locally based research company that provides an exhaustive amounts of research to the business sector at a national and international level.

The bees have been doing fairly well. I plan on heading out this weekend to provide them one last dole of heavy sugar syrup to tide them over until early Spring. My friends hive..well we will see.  They don’t share the same robust nature of my insectoid demon spawns from Texas.

So far I have not provided any Apistan strips, Menthol packets, Checkmite, essential oil colonic s or one gram of Terramyician powder to my bees and they seem just fine. The true test will come next year when I wait and see if they pop out from the dark side of the moon come Spring alive and well or in a wooden mausoleum.  They seem strong.

Before I moved to the Central Virginia area I took off about 60 pounds of frames from my older colonies to extract as soon as I moved in. Well 1.5 years later I extracted the honey in my driveway within the city limits.   What a mistake. I thought I would encounter less bees.  I forgot that Charlottesville is an agro-friendly community. We can have goats, chickens, and yes even bee hives on our property.

Within 10 minutes of uncapping they began to come. The scout bees. The scout bees must have danced a highland jig because within 40 minutes every honeybee within the Charlottesville area was at the Rugby Road Honey Free For All Festival. It was almost absurd trying to extract but it had to get done. Hundreds of bees perished in my extractor whose lid had been torn off by the movers. If you looked down into the sea of Fructos you could see the poor souls trying to extricate themselves one leg at a time to no avail. Eventually they went under and were later filtered out into a mass of sugary death. I probably only pulled about 40 pounds of honey but it is enough to give away to people who count in my life. So much for reaping huge profits again.

With the cooler weather came Halloween. This year I dressed up as a Zom-BeeKeeper. The makeup kit provided to me by the Halloween store assured me I would have the skin of a Ghoul if I followed the simple directions. About an hour later I looked like a white guy in black face.  I quickly had my wife take a few pictures and washed off the makeup and put on the less controversial Cowboy Action Shooting costume. Happy Halloween to all.

Oh Nooo A Zombee Keeper!!!

More braiiiiiiinnss!!

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The other day I received an email from a fellow named Timothy Sellers of the band Artichoke. He wanted to see if I might be interested in reviewing his bands album called “Bees”.  I said sure. What could it hurt. He mailed off a CD for me to listen to.  It must be said before my review that the last album or CD I have bought was Guns and Roses last recording, Chinese Democracy, a true stink festival of music that should not have seen the light of day.  I fully expected “Bees” to be as good as that or any form of Christian Rock and Roll music used in those “hip” teen church services. It sounds like music but is just as bland and tasteless to the ears as a generic .25 cent can of fake Coke.

Arriving in the mail box a few days later I ripped off the mailing package and looked at the box.  First impressions are important to me  and it was nice to see a real CD in a case with nice graphics and not some hand scrawled note of “Listen To This” sticky noted to a generic Panasonic 750MB data cd. So far so good. Driving to the bee yard was a perfect time to listen to this album. How was it?

Pretty darned good. Instead of music engineered for a Raffi concert I heard real music with real love and heart packed into it. These guys were not just singing flim flam songs about bees with touchy feely vocals and healf hearted strumming of the guitar. They believed everything they were pouring out of the speakers.  From listening to the lyrics you get the feeling that at least one of the band members has bees because their lyrics spoke truth to the biology and the behavior of Apis Mellifera.

This album is just fun to listen to, more so if you happen to bee a beekeeper and can understand the inside the hive humor.  If I had to label them as sounding like another band it would be hard but for the sake of the review I would say a combination of The Violent Femmes, maybe a little They Might Be Giants, The Presidents of The United States, and a dash of Weezer or The Sex Pistols. Good fun music that is catchy and should be paid for with a modest payment to Amazon or using their website found at the link below.

Amazon

ArtichokeTheBand

I give them 4 jars of honey. Of note, 5 jars of honey equals something like the greatest song in the world and has never been acquired in human history.

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As stated before my bees are some spiteful little bastards. Originally I thought it might be external factors but with the re-queening of one of my friend’s hive with the same type of queens purchased for mine I can almost safely conclude it is the genetics. Weeks ago my friends hives were the vision of serenity.  Easy to work with Italians that could be handled without gloves and very little smoking.  The hive whose queen has been replaced has now transitioned into the House of Usher with all sorts of horrors coming from within.  They exhibit the same level of tension as my hives do when its  lid is opened. You can hear the thrum emanate from its core.  They are just pissed off bees. The other hive of his, which still is inhabited by Italians is still mellow and nice to work with.

I now have to objectively assess what I want to do.  Although my bees are not the easiest bees to work with I have to admit their population is vibrant, pulling most of the comb, and actually storing a fair quantity of honey for the winter.  I am amazed with their brood patterns.  They  are solidly packed with eggs, larva and adults. No half-ass placement of eggs by these queens. They have the work ethic and craftsmanship of  German engineers. The Italians on the other hand are not so productive.  They exhibit the same level of industry as a Yugo factory.  They get the work done and in theory it should work, but in the end they will probably starve to death over winter without any help.

I think I will just put up with their antics as long as they keep producing well.  They may have the temperament of an angry German engineer but they do fine quality work.   Maybe their horrible personality is part of the price for having bees that will survive on their own without medications or weird Rube Goldberg devices to remove the mites.

On another note, as I was working with the bees I realized how important it is for a beekeeper to be mindful in their own actions.  My beekeeping mentor of old taught me a lot of what is needed in the way of mindset when working with the bees.

We have a picture in our mind that we are helping the bees and are their benefactor. With our white suit and hat and general outlook on life that I have found most beekeepers have it is easy to forget that to them we are really monsters. Basically we are like a whitely suited King Kong ham-fisting our way through their home on a  bi-weekly basis. For all we know they have come up with a hive mind like mythology or religion based upon our appearance.  “Oh no, the sun has risen and fallen 14 times. Now again begins the ritual sacrifice we must go through to live in such a well designed home!!! May the great White Sheet God show mercy upon us with his hands of smoke and sword!! May he only crush 200 of us unlike the last time!! Oh woe is us!!” See what I mean.

So we can either be the angry bearded old man god found in the Old Testament who wiped out cities for juggling pigs or we can be the benevolent god of peace which my Google results could not find a single one.

Comparisons

To help beekeepers become the kindly Amun-Ra of their own bees one should keep in mind several things.

1. Know exactly what you want to do before you do it.  The more you move the components of your hive the more likely it is you are smashing, grinding, and de-limbing your worshipers. Every action should have a purpose. If you just want to take a look for the sake of looking your are probably going to kill some bees for your own gratification. Look because you are trying to determine something. The hives health, state of stress, mites, anything but just don’t look for the hell of it. That is what an observation hive is for.

2. When replacing hive bodies or supers I place the box at an angle compared to the other box. I then slowly rotate the boxes until they line up. Doing this helps gives the bees time to move out of the way of the oncoming wall. Just plopping the box down on top of the other so that they align right away is a sure way of crushing 10  or so bees.

3. Have the movement of a sloth or Tai-Chi master.  Bees don’t like swift movements.  Maybe their minds exist in another temporal space from ours but  I have found that when you move quickly, like when you swat at bees, it only attracts more and seems to aggravate them.

4. When pulling the frames out. Be sure you have loosened them well and pull them out as vertically as you can.  Any movement of the frame off from its 90 degree extraction will kill bees between the frames or at least increase their stress levels as they are mashed into the adjacent comb. Again go slowly as you do it.

5. When placing frames back into the hive, don’t ram them home like a railroad spike. Slowly and deliberately is the plan for the day.

6. Don’t smoke the hell out of them every five seconds.  Use just a little smoke  when necessary. I have seen some people just asphyxiate their bees with bellows of smoke.

7. Wait until later in the day if possible.  Too early and their will be more population in the hive equaling more potential for loss of worshipers. Wait too late and the same thing happens.  I usually go out between 2-5 depending on the time of year.

These are just seven lucky tips I try to keep in mind.  If any of you have others please add them in the comments below.

The key is just to play it smart, be deliberate in everything you do, and try to keep your bees less agitated.  The more agitated they become the greater the chance they will find their location too much of a hassle and swarm to some place less inhabited by the angry bee gods.

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