Summer Lovin'...

...happened so fast....

Over the past few weeks I haven't been able to get that song out of my head.  I can't believe Summer is closing in on us.  In previous years, the start of school didn't really affect me since my kids were too young, but this year our oldest son Mason is heading off to a half-day pre-school.  AND he gets to ride the school bus.  (which he is thrilled about).  So we have just a few more days of Summer and then I adjust to my baby leaving the nest every day.  Here are just a few snapshots that capture our last few weeks at Honeyrun Farm.

A visit to the Old Mill Velvet Ice Cream in Utica, OH.

                                 

Feeding corn husks to the horses and cows at Grandma and Grandpas.

Sweet corn!  Our favorite summer treat.

Bridger likes it fresh... no cooking required.

Isaac shows off his latest honey crop.

That's some heavy honey.

Isaac says the hives are "caked out" (full of honey).

"I want a peach!  Daddy, give me a peach!"

Isaac shows Mason and Maizy the wonder of a wax moth larvae.  "Can I put it in the fire, daddy?"

Lucky for us, the bees know nothing about school starting, and they keep bringing in that sweet summer honey.

-posted by Jayne

It's a Sweet Job

-Posted by Isaac

Pun intended.

We've had some high profile people tour the bee farm over the last couple weeks. Two doctors, a lawyer and a medical chemist walked through the honey barn, looked over the hives in the yard, asked insightful questions and silly questions. Yesterday, Mike, the head grocer at Whole Foods Dublin was here to check us out. I put him to work extracting honey.

At my mother's Sunday dinner last week, I was thinking out loud about how such professional people seem impressed with our little mickey-mouse operation. My brother responded with, "I'll bet they're more envious of you than you of them."

True or not, that comment got me thinking. I really do love this job. Even the hot sweaty stinging parts of it. I was pulling honey in a yard last Friday, thinking, entertaining myself with the various reasons I've got a cool job. I jotted ten of them down on the drive home.

So here you go. The top ten reasons this beekeeping life is awesome:

#10 - Beekeepers are characters.

There's good, there's bad, and there's ugly (most, in fact), but everyone I come in contact with in the small world of beekeeping seems opinionated and interesting.

#9 - I don't have to answer to anyone.

Well, my wife, of course. And God sometimes. For the most part though, I'm free to make my own schedule and spend the day as I please. As long as the work gets done I can show up late, start early, take a nap, take a run, take a swim, have a snack, play with kids, etc...   Of course certain times of the year, July and August for example, everything gets crowded out and about all there is to do is work. But I enjoy it.

#8 - You can sample your work as you're doing it.

Honey or pollen, in beekeeping you can continually check the product, making sure it meets the most rigorous quality standards.

#7 - It's a useful job. 

Some jobs turn the wheels of the world and some jobs don't. We all know this. I have in the past, feeling high on myself, described beekeeping as "God's work"  I don't think this is much of a stretch.

Sure, Mr. preacher man, you save souls here and there, but I pollinate whole orchards... I think we all know which is more important in God's eyes.  

  

 #6 - You work in open spaces and you work alone.
That pretty much sums it up. Alas, I'm not always alone. Only on the good days.

#5 - There's something very cowboyish about beekeeping.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but I think it fits my personality. It kind of goes with the open spaces and working alone thing. I first thought this when I was working with the big commercial migratory operation in Montana. I think maybe Wayne, my boss, even said this a time or two. "We're the last real cowboys..."
We drove the lil' doggies all night long.  We got to watch the sun rise and sun set.
The song is right: Mommas, make your babies be doctors and lawyers and such...

#4 - You don't have to be an ace mechanic
It helps, but unlike farming grain where you have to know how to fix every apparatus under the sun, bee farming deals with a lot of low-tech stuff and hands-on labor. This is good for a dummy like me.
You only need to know a little about pumps, sumps, heaters, spinners, tanks, engines, motors, trailers, saws, nail guns, valves, filters, refractometers, etc.
Which I don't.

#3 - No B.S. hoops to jump through.
When I taught school we had years of certification and recertification. Classes and tests to take. Fingerprinting. Licensing. Professional development days. Collaboration days. Staff meetings. Conferences. Continual improvement evaluations.
Just thinking about all that crap makes my blood run cold.

#2 - Beekeeping is a job where the kids can join in.

 Much like what we see in Amish country where Jayne grew up, the children can see and understand what the parents are doing. Up there, Daddy doesn't drive off in the morning, come back at night and the kids are clueless as to what he's doing all day.
As our kids grow up, I hope they're be able to take part and maybe even one day take over.
So Jayne and I can move to Montana.

#1 - Jayne can always go back to work.
She's the brains behind the operation, so if in the end it all falls apart and comes crashing down, I can simply blame it on her and send her to work. Myself, I'll keep cowboying around with bees.

It's not like she's doing a lot now anyway.

Standing amidst a swarm of bees

-posted by Jayne

We thought you might like to see and hear what it feels like to stand in a swarm of honeybees.  At the end, Maizy says "Daddy might go right there and 'shoo-fly' that bee."  

And that's exactly what he did... that is... he put them in a new box which they claimed as their new home.   This makes 38 swarms this year!

Comb Honey

-Posted by Isaac

Wow, how time does fly in the summer. It's been over two weeks since our last post. Busy busy on the bee farm. The summer honey is just caked in the supers and I'm exhausting myself on these hot afternoons pulling it off the hives, getting it to the honey barn and eventually extracting. The recent rain has been a welcome relief.

I thought I'd show you a little of the comb honey we got into last week. 

These things are called "Ross Rounds." They're a real pain in the butt to produce, but as you can see, the end product is beautiful. I tell other beekeepers that if I had to do it over with comb honey, I'd never go with Ross Rounds. The bees seem to avoid them like the plague, and you just about have to find a hive on the verge of swarming to really force the bees up into the super.

There's something they just don't like about the small round space with a thin sheet of wax foundation.

Alas, the bees eventually cooperate, and draw out some comb. A decent nectar flow definitely helps.

You can see that these supers are not your run-of-the-mill bee boxes. Specialty items like this always incur some expense. That's why we're sticking with the Ross Rounds-- too much money wrapped up in them!

A selling point with the Ross Rounds is that the honey is never touched. The round section comes exactly the way the bees make it. After freezing it for a day to kill any unseen wax moth eggs, we simply pop the section out and put a lid on it.

You can see that they don't all come perfectly capped off. (One on the far left) 

These not-quite-done sections are turned into chunk honey.

A tasty job that Julia just loves.

This cut comb will later be surrounded by beautiful translucent summer honey.

Of course you can find both comb and chunk honey by visiting us at the farmers markets. Please come out and see us on Saturdays! Worthington and the North Market.

Or make the trip down to the farm stand on Randle Rd. It's cheaper in the country.

I mentioned being busy with pulling the summer honey... as an excuse for the recent slack on this blog. I thought this picture might catch your interest. As in, it's not something you see every day. This is what  a thousand pounds of honey looks like in the back of a truck:

Thanks for reading a little about our comb honey production.  If you're curious enough to want to try one, head on over to our Etsy store.

Hopefully by the end of the season we'll have five or six hundred of these sections ready to decorate kitchen tables around central Ohio.  

Sweet Summer

-Posted by Isaac

It's been really dry as you know. I don't think we've had a meaningful rain in six weeks. This means that flowers conserve nectar, thereby limiting the summer honey production. This is what I'm seeing in the hives-- some honey, but not a huge amount. I'm glad our hive count is up this year.

Some plants do well in dry conditions. Lavender is one. This is a row Jayne and I planted three years ago:

We went to a lavender festival in southern Ohio a couple weeks ago, and watched women in Sunday dresses snip little sprigs of lavender. For me, it's much more enjoyable to watch our own naked ladies sample the lavender.

                                                 Wow, can she use her tongue!

I was on the phone with Jim North (friend, beekeeper, Jedi master) and noticed a cloud of bees moving over the cornfield. As I watched and talked, I observed that the swarm was directing itself toward one of my very own hives. Walking out there, sure enough, they were moving in!

 I told Jim what was happening, and he said that sometimes you get a "hostile takeover" of a small hive.  That's exactly what I witnessed. This was only a two frame split, and apparently the swarm decided that there was plenty of unused space in there. I checked on them yesterday evening, and the box was full of bees-- swarm bees. We had a few casualties out front, but all in all I think I'll take the swarm.

Speaking of swarms. We caught number thirty of the season a few days ago. They moved into a trap, I brought them home, hived them, and the next day they were out on the limb of a small locust tree. I guess the home I gave them didn't suit. Later that morning I noticed that the scouts were checking out the very box that they had originally been trapped in. So I put the trap on top of the trellis to see what would happen:

 They moved in! Right over top of the fire pit. This makes Jayne a bit leary when we have company, but I think it's a nice conversation piece. Who wouldn't want to watch stinging insects fly home right over one's head?

We're making more splits using Koehnen queens from California. Carniolans. I've been noticing that hives with these queens do much better then the Georgia queens.  Makes me think of that Beach Boys song... "Wish they all could be California... girls..."

Mason helped me with the cork and candy plugs that go in the cages.
Mainly, he seemed more interested in the candy plug.

The bees got a little help from our sweet tooth.

Summer honey is right around the corner.