Welcome back! After such a long hiatus, I’ve decided to reboot this blog. From here on out you won’t just hear about my beekeeping tales, but also my other hobbies like crafts, home improvements and cooking. I hope you enjoy it!
The Lady Beekeeper 2.0
Posted in Beekeeping, Crafts & Sewing, Culinary Delights, Parties, Thrift Finds
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A Series of Rookie Mistakes and Lame Ducks
Well after a truly disappointing year with no bees the lady beekeeper is back. Let me fill you all in where I left off. Rosalinda (may she rest in peace) and her colony perished at the very end of the winter in early March 2014. It was only a couple of weeks before the weather broke, but they ran completely out of honey and I still believe it was too cold to feed them at that point.
I ordered another package of bees, this time from the local beekeeper near me. I also ordered a marked queen since I had so much trouble finding the queen last year. Installing the package went off without a hitch (mostly, except when I dropped the queen cage into the 5 pounds of worker bees and had to fish it out, swearing under my breath the whole time).
Unfortunately I had to wait over two weeks to check on the queen because the weather was so lousy during the first weekend. (Ideally you wait for a nice sunny day to open the hive when the bees are out foraging.) By the time I looked in the hive there was no sign of the queen but there were eggs being laid at odd angles or multiple per cell. The hive was also overrun with drones! A telltale sign of laying workers. My best guess is they killed the queen, then some of the workers started developing ovaries without the queen’s pheromones to suppress them. When this happens the workers are able to lay eggs, but since they have never actually mated, all the eggs will be unfertilized. This means only drones will be produced. Drones are the male honeybees, whose sole purpose in life is to mate and die. If you’re only producing (virtually) useless drones and no worker bees, your colony is pretty much doomed.
Well great. After discovering this I rushed to the local beekeeping supply where I got the package and purchased a new queen. Unfortunately, I was in a hurry and didn’t follow the right procedure to rid my hive of the laying workers. Instead, I sophomorically decided that introducing a new queen would set things right so I did just that. Shortly after adding the queen I read about laying workers and how normally in this situation the bees will kill the newly introduced queen since they are now loyal to their laying worker(s). Well great.
This did not happen to me. Instead they left the queen alone, but the laying workers continued laying. Apparently they weren’t threatened enough by the new queen to kill her? Seems odd. Almost like I got a dud queen. (Or two dud queens!) By this point the hive had dwindled considerably and was about 80% drones. I decided to cut my losses and wrote the colony off as dead since I didn’t think there were enough worker bees to properly correct the laying worker issue. But I didn’t want that second $30 queen to go to waste.
Luckily my beekeeper co-worker offered to split one of his hives into a nuc cluster (tiny hive box). So I went back to my hive, recaptured the queen and got her back into the little queen cage. That took some doing. I then brought the queen over to my co-worker’s house and we added the queen to his nuc. Two weeks later he reported they had killed her. Great. Definitely not my year for beekeeping.
But did I mention we got a dog?
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Bees in the Bath
I have been fantasizing about a new design for my bathroom for the past month, because that is what I do – fantasize about bathrooms. I mean rooms. When Will & I bought the house I knew it was perfect because the previous owners had left everything neutral – white walls, hardwoods, grey tiles and grey rugs. A virtual canvas. The first thing I did was paint everything in my dining room between the white wainscoting and the white crown molding avocado green (Valspar Greentree to be exact). Sound hideous? It is actually glorious. (I got the idea from my fabulous Wedgewood china in Oberon).
But anyway I digress. While I was daydreaming about my blank white bathroom walls with ugly white porcelain drawer pulls – the ladies snuck into my daydream. The bathroom has this neat hexagonal (okay its octagonal – but who’s counting) window that reminds me of honeycomb. This then reminded me of the fabulous soap that my aunt gave my mom from C’est la bee (her friend’s shop – also a beekeeper). I scoured the internet for wallpaper patterns with the Napoleonic bee until I realized wallpaper is ridiculously expensive. Eventually I stumbled upon an article on pinterest showing this neat bee themed table setting – with a stencil from Royal Design Studio. They had not one, but two bee designs to choose from.
Let me rave about these stencils for a minute. I have never stenciled before, but it was incredibly easy. I used a 2″ brush, 4 oz of bright gold stencil paint and “The Buzz” stencil, all purchased from Royal Design Studio. The stencils are made to cover large areas of wall and look like wallpaper. You have to be a bit particular to get the designs to match up and measure out correctly but it is worth it. Several people have asked if it is wallpaper. And the stencil is indestructible. At first I was gentle with it, but by the end I was slapping it on the wall, bending it at odd angles and there is not a hint of wear on the plastic.
So after I convinced my husband to help me paint the bathroom Fairmont Lobby Cream (he is the best). I spent a ridiculous amount of quality time with that stencil, painting the bathroom with bees. It took me 8 hours in total. Not in one sitting that would be crazy. Well, it was still a bit crazy. But it was totally worth it – pictures below.
Using the dry brush method to apply paint
Action shot of me lining up the stencil
Hexagonal… err… octagonal window
Vanity
So many bees
Close up of the bee motif.
Posted in Crafts & Sewing
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Let the Sun Shine in
Lots of worried family and friends have been asking how the ladies are fairing in this cold New England weather. I feel a bit silly – but all I tell them is, “they’re still in there”. You see, I don’t want to open the hive to risk giving them a chill, even on the warmer days we’ve had. In my beekeeping travels and encounters I have met several beekeepers who have lost hives by opening them up on too cold a winter day. Instead all I have been doing is keeping their entrance clear of snow and dead bees so they can take cleansing flights in the warmer weather. I also put my ear up to the hive to listen to the faint hum of the cluster. At least I know they’re still in there.
So – if not dealing with the bees – what has the lady beekeeper been doing in her spare time? Well it will probably bore most of my usual readers, but for lack of anything more exciting I’ll tell you. I have been concocting a list of projects that I want to accomplish around the house. I’ve finally finished one of them that I’ve had in progress for a long time – curtains for the living room.
I originally bought the fabric for these curtains in the bargain section of Joann fabrics, intending to make curtains for the dining room. I wanted to do a draped swag, but by the time I finally got around to drafting out the plans, I realized I hadn’t bought nearly enough fabric. I went back to Joann’s to buy more of the fabric – but the original receipt was so old the printing had completely faded so you couldn’t read the sku! For the record I had kept the receipt in the basement away from light, inside the original bag for six months – so as far as I’m concerned they use disappearing ink. I searched and searched for the fabric online and eventually gave up.
Two months ago I happened upon the fabric again and thought it might look nice for curtains in the living room instead (which has only two standard windows instead of a standard window and large bay window). I decided on simple panel curtains that would take much less fabric. Well, I drew out my plans.. AND I WAS STILL A YARD SHORT. Seriously?! So I did some fancy math and decided that I could make the panels a bit narrower (2/3 of the original width of the fabric), match up the patterns and still make all four panels the correct length – it just took a bit of finagling – but I finally finished them. Finished pictures below. (If you’re curious about details of construction – post me a note and I’ll add them.)
Note the light fixture in this room – I installed this right after I put up the curtains! I was tired of the old ceiling fan fixture that provided no light. Who has a ceiling fan in a living room?
Curtains from the side. Floor length.
The curtains are completely lined – but the sun we get is so intense in the morning it shines right through. Definitely not a dark room.
Posted in Crafts & Sewing
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Sweet Surrender
Well the bees are all nestled in their hive for the winter and we’ve been keeping busy with other things. Since I always need a project I signed up to decorate a tree for the festival of trees celebration in our town. The trees get raffled off at the end of the week and the 4H club, who sponsors the event, keeps the proceeds from the raffle. I decided to make our tree’s theme “A German Christmas” and plan to decorate it with German Christmas Stars and Lebkuchen. So far I’ve made 17 stars – they take about 45 minutes each to make, we’ll see how far I get. Next year I need to do a bee themed tree!
I also experimented with some lip balm making a while back! Since I had beeswax from some of the burr comb I removed early in the summer, I decided to give it a go. I love lavender so I followed this recipe (omitting cocoa and lipstick) to create an olive oil and beeswax based “honey lavender balm”. I was skeptical about how it would come out, until I added the honey and the consistency instantly changed. In the end it became about the consistency of Carmex but it has a much better taste and smell. I have been using it nightly before bed and I personally believe it works wonders on dried lips.
On another semi-bee-related note, I have been thinking a lot about mead lately. Problem is if I wanted to make mead from my hive’s honey I’d have to wait two more years for a taste of the stuff (one to harvest honey and one to ferment). But finding another honey source seemed counter-intuitive. I finally decided that I needed to bite the bullet and buy honey. Well, as I’d known all along, honey is expensive. For a 5 gallon batch of mead I’ll need 10 to 15 lbs of honey. That is quite a bit of honey. I found a couple websites selling 20 gallon buckets of honey for fairly reasonable prices, but the shipping price was greater than the cost of the honey. I looked on craigslist for local sources of honey but no one was selling that large a quantity.
I’d mostly given up the search until I found a groupon for Strange Brew, the local homebrew supply store. My friend (and a fellow home-brewer) bought one as well, so we stopped by after work last week. One of the staff showed us their honey for purchase (60 pound buckets), and we talked about mead and bees. Turns out he’d tried beekeeping himself, but had an unpleasant experience. He’d tried Italians, who had died over the winter, Russians, who didn’t produce, and finally a hybridized variety. The hybrid bees turned out to be a hybrid between the extremely aggressive Africanized honey bees and Apis mellifera (European Honeybees). Every time he approach the hive the bees would swarm him. In minutes he would become covered head to toe in thousands of bees. He had a state inspector come out to his hive to help him determine why they were so aggressive. The inspector immediately recognized that they were Africanized and instructed him to torch the hive. Scary.
Back to the honey. I’d thought that 60 lbs seemed like a bit much, even for us honey fanatics, but I decided to call Will and see what he thought. He told me to go for it (maybe he didn’t realize exactly how much honey is in a 60 pound bucket). Since I was expecting Will to be the voice of reason I was completely thrown off. It was then that I completely lost my mind, purchased a bucket of honey and headed home. As soon as I left the store I felt like a bit of a lunatic and started thinking what on earth I was going to do with a 7 gallon bucket of honey. I still really don’t have an answer.
Posted in Crafts & Sewing, Uncategorized
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Rosalinda on the Silver Screen
I forgot to show everyone Will’s video of me searching for the queen! I was doing one final hive visit while the weather was above 55 and sunny. I was a bit worried about getting in another visit before winter set in since it had been in the low 40’s the previous week. I left work early to get to my hive before the sun started setting. My main mission: check on honey stores and the queen.
Since it had been so cold I believed the queen’s egg production would have slowed down or stopped by then. This means the only way to tell if the queen is alive is by actually finding her. Previously I’ve had a lot of trouble finding Rosalinda since she is unmarked. (Most people will request a “marked” queen that is painted with a small dot on her back.) I searched for a good 15 minutes in the lower deep and I finally found her! She is huge compared to the other bees, even the drones who are significantly larger than the workers. I won’t make you sit through the entire 15 minutes of searching – but Will caught her on tape. The clip of Rosalinda’s hollywood debut is below!
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Winter in the Hive
Well the leaves are changing colors, the days have been getting shorter and we have been BUSY! I apologize for my drought of updates – we’ve had weddings and a vacation keeping us busy. Since its been getting cooler the number one bee question I’ve been asked lately is, “what do bees do during the winter?” I thought I’d let you all know. Its an excellent question. They certainly don’t fly south – those little wings wouldn’t make it to Rhode Island and back. Instead they pretty much hunker down in their hive, which we beekeepers have helped fortify.
As the temperatures start to drop in the fall, the bees continue collecting nectar and sap for propolis. They store the nectar and sugar syrup away as honey for winter food stores and they use the sap to make propolis. Propolis is a sticky mess initially, but it hardens to a strong orange varnish. The bees use it to fill in any cracks and holes that may make the hive drafty during the winter. During this time period the queen slows egg production and they start kicking the drones (male non-worker bees) out of the hive so they don’t have to feed extra mouths.
When the temperatures drops to the low 50’s (F) the bees form what is call the winter cluster. It is exactly what it sounds like – the bees cluster together on top of their honey stores, eat the honey and vibrate causing friction and heat. The worker bees take turn swapping from the outside of the cluster to the inside. The queen remains in the center of the cluster the entire winter where temperatures remains in the upper 90’s (F). While in the cluster she stops laying eggs until spring.
The bees pretty much take care of themselves – but aside from feeding them sugar syrup to replenish their food stores there is a bit beekeepers can do to help. To further prevent drafts, many beekeepers cover the entire hive with roofing paper. Unfortunately drafts are not the only thing beekeepers must worry about. With so much heat generated from the winter cluster, and temperatures so low on the outside of the hive condensation can form without proper ventilation. Beekeepers must insure proper ventilation for their hives or risk cold condensation dripping onto the bees and killing them. I researched a bit and discovered that some beekeepers use a product called homosote – an insulating sound-proofing material – for the top of their hives. In addition to providing insulation, the board will hold moisture caused by condensation. This prevents it from dripping back down on the bees, but allows the bees to retrieve the water when they need it.
Finally – with the warm temperatures inside the hive the bees will sometimes get freeloaders looking for warmth. While the bees normally can defend against mice and other critters during warmer weather, they can’t do much when they are vibrating to stay warm. For this reason beekeepers will add what they call a mouse guard – a metal device at the entrance of the hive that allows the bees to come and go, but is much too small for a mouse. It is important that the guard be metal since mice are known to chew through wood entrance reducers to get to the warmth inside.
Next time I’ll tell you about my lip gloss making experiment!
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Secret Life of Beekeepers
So I apologize that I didn’t update last week – I was at a conference for work in Portland, OR. While I was presenting my poster at the conference one of my co-workers that I hadn’t seen in over a year stopped by to chat about the poster. After discussing work, the conversation drifted to hobbies – he mentioned how he had several chickens and had been recently raising goats. Apparently his children were showing the goats in the state fair that week. While on the topic of agriculture, I mentioned how I started raising bees this year. His response was that coincidently he’d gotten bees himself. We chatted for a while about our hives and he mentioned how he decided to get them – he thought it would be a cool hobby to do with his son. He said initially his son was afraid of bees, but now has warmed up to their honey bees and will sit near the hive to watch them!
This conversation wasn’t at all out of the norm. I’ve had dozens of experiences like this, meeting fellow beekeepers randomly by mentioning my hobby. Its almost like its a secret society, where you utter the right word to a fellow member and you have an instant bond. And this underground beekeeper network is vast – almost everyone I mention beekeeping to has some connection to the hobby. Most often they have a neighbor, friend or relative who keeps bees, but sometimes they are a beekeeper themself. A couple months ago my co-worker forwarded my name to one of the managers in the other building – turns out he got his bees the same week I did! (This is a shout out if you’re reading this.) After that discovery my husband likes to joke that beekeeping is better for networking than learning to golf!
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Craigslist Adventures
So let me tell you about my latest adventure. For the past month or so I’ve been scouring craigslist for a honey extractor. Some of you may have heard about some of my craigslist adventures and fabulous purchases. In the past I’ve bought a brand new bedroom set, granite bar, antique writing desk etc for extreme discounts. I’ve driven to all parts of the state, and met all sorts of interesting people buying these things! Craigslist shopping is like an adventure in itself. The only terrible experience I’ve had with craigslist is the time my husband and I tried to buy a chandelier new-in-the-box for a quarter of retail value. But that’s another story for another time.
Honey extractors are ridiculously expensive, especially if you want something that is going to last. The principle to extracting honey is simple – slice off the wax cappings with a hot knife (called a decapping knife), insert the frame into a centrifuge and use the magic of physics to gently spin the honey out. Because the centrifuge must spin multiple frames of honey weighing anywhere from 5-10 pounds each they must be durable. This makes the extractors pricey. The last one I found in my price range was a rusty mess. And the picture was dark and blurry – clearly taken in someone’s basement. I asked Will if the extractor was too sketchy looking to pursue and he burst out laughing saying “what IS that, a torture device?” I took that as a yes.
The one I found this week was an older model, but it was in great condition and the owner (let’s call him Bill) said he would throw in a decapping knife! What a bargain! I drove to the couples’ house after work and pulled up in front of this gorgeous Victorian home. They had told me they would meet me by their toolshed so I pulled into the backyard where Bill, his wife, 8 chickens and a dog were waiting in their huge garden. I liked them already!
I was curious why he was getting rid of the extractor, so I questioned him about it. He said he didn’t have a Langstroth hive (like I have). Bill had purchased the extractor from a retiring beekeeper before buying a hive. In the end he had gone with the Warre model hive and had no use for the extractor. I had never heard of Warre hives so he gave me the tour. The Warre hive looks very similar to the Langstroth hive on the outside; it is just a stack of boxes. But the internals and principle of the Warre hive are very different. Instead of adding boxes to the top of the hive when things get crowded as you do in the Langstroth hive, the Warre hive works off the bees natural tendency to build downwards, so boxes are inserted at the bottom of the stack. Also unlike Langstroth hives the bees in Warre hives build their own comb entirely from scratch. In my hive I fill each frame with a sheet of starter beeswax before putting it into the hive. This gives the bees a template for building their comb, which can be used to control where they build and the width of the honeycomb. (The Langstroth comb template is slightly larger than the size that bees would use in the wild and allows a higher honey to wax ratio. Some beekeepers believe this unnatural comb change encourages disease – I guess I’ll form my own opinions eventually.) In the Warre hive they have wooden strips fixed with a thin wax starter strip, but no real frame. These divided strips allow beekeepers to remove the comb for inspection when necessary.
My Langstroth hive with two brood boxes
Frame from my Langstroth hive. The bees build the comb from the starter wax.
A Warre Hive setup.
A Warre hive “strip” with comb.
Bill said the only problem with the Warre hive is that it is difficult to get good advice about its maintenance. He had signed up for a beekeeping class to learn about his new hive, only to discover that none of the instructors had ever used or seen a Warre hive! He did recommend the class anyway because the discounts at local shops and the networking alone were worth it. After he helped me load the extractor into the car I asked if he had managed to register his hives with the state. I explained how I had tried to sign up (to no avail) just to get advice from professional beekeepers and he laughed saying, “we feel the less the government is involved with our bees, the better.”
My “new” honey extractor!
Posted in Beekeeping, Thrift Finds
Tagged craigslist, decapping knife, honey, honey extractor, Langstroth hive, Warre hive
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A Bout of Illness
I was looking at my hive yesterday and saw a sad sight. A few bees were convulsing on the doorstep of the hive. Their legs were twitching and their proboscises were sticking out (like you’d see a tongue loll out of someone’s mouth when they were having a seizure). It was very sad to watch. My latest theory is that some of my girls were hit with a dose of neuro-poison pesticide. I recently discovered that our town is part of the “Central Massachusetts Mosquito Control Project” or CMMCP. This means that at will the CMMCP can spray pesticides anywhere on your property to stop mosquito activities. According to their schedule they spray each town weekly with these chemicals, and urge individuals to stay indoors after sundown when they are spraying. If you are adverse to the idea of spraying pesticides you can put your property on the “no spray” list. Unfortunately this means that even if you’re on the “no spray” list, and your neighbor is pesticide happy and calls CMMCP weekly, the pesticides could still drift onto your property or your bees could forage in your neighbors yard during the spraying and promptly die.
I may sound like a bit of a libertarian, but my first thought was, ‘pesticides are toxic, not only to insects, but generally to mammals as well – do they really need to spray weekly or at all’? The worst part is that I wouldn’t have even known about the pesticide spraying had our neighbors not mentioned it to us. You would have expected a flier or something in the mail to warn residents not to venture outside during certain hours. To be fair, the spray information is displayed prominently on the town website during the summer – but really, how often do residents go to the town website?
Knowing I was a beekeeper, my neighbor was kind enough to obtain the datasheets for the chemicals they are spraying. Anvil 10+10 ULV (d-Phenothrin/Sumithrin) is pretty nasty stuff. While it is affective on mosquitos it is listed as “highly toxic to bees” as well as aquatic organisms. In the datasheet they also mention it is harmful to humans if it absorbed through the skin (do not be outside during application). On the internet there are studies showing it has been known to cause liver tumors in mammals. In addition it was taken off the market as a flea/tick preventative because it was poisoning dogs and cats. Though the poison is dangerous, it is used to kill mosquitos and prevent the propagation of West Nile Virus (WNV) and Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), both of which can lead to death or brain damage in a small percentage of the population.
So, with these terrifying outcomes, how worried should I be about these mosquito diseases? For perspective 270 people in America died from West Nile Virus last year. Over the last 50 years approximately 6 people a year have contracted EEE (most of the EEE cases are in the New England area). Assuming that everyone in the US is at an equal risk for contracting and dying of WNV there is a less than .0001% chance that you will die from WNV. And assuming that only New England is susceptible to EEE there is less than .000001% chance you will contract EEE. These two figures hover right around the likelihood that you will be struck by lightning. So what do you believe? Is it worth destroying the natural environment and exposing yourself to carcinogens to further reduce this figure?
