Queen

-Posted by Isaac

This is about a little bug that makes our Honeyrun world go round.

Enjoy some easy listening Queen while you hunt for these fat bottomed girls.

(And turn it up!  Just hit the triangle play button.)

Fat Bottomed Girls

You make the rockin world go round!

Hey!

I was just a skinny lad

Never knew no good from bad

But I knew life before I left my nursery

Huh

                                                                        

Left alone with big fat Fanny

 

She was such a naughty nanny 

                     

Heap big woman, you made a bad boy out of me 

Bad Boy Beekeeper

Hey Hey!

 

I've been singing with my band

Across the water, 'cross the land

 

I seen every blue eyed floozy on the way

But their beauty and their style
 

Went kind of smooth after a while

Take me to them naughty ladies 

                                                       every time!

                                 

C'mon! 

Oh, won't you take me home tonight...

Fat Bottomed Girls

You make the rockin world go round!

Hey listen here... 

Now I got mortgages on homes

I got stiffness in ma' bones

Ain't no beauty queens in this locality

I Tell You!

Oh, but I still get my pleasure

Still got my greatest treasure

Heap big woman,

you done made a big man of me!

                                  

Now get this

 

Are you gonna take me home tonight...

Please...

Can you find her?

Fat Bottomed Girls

 You make the Rockin World Go Round!

Yeah

Get on your bikes and ride!

Yeah yeah yeah

Spring Honey-- Check

-posted by Isaac

The last of the extracted supers are heading back to the bee yards.

Spring honey's all done for another year.
This should have been finished up about ten days ago, but we get distracted sometimes.

This year was just excellent. High quality, wonderfully delicate, beautiful white honey.
And a lot of it.

Among other things, we took some Spring honey to the Pickaway County Fair.

And we cleaned up:

 

Jayne thought it was silly to put this on here, but I don't mind tooting our own horn.
I also don't mind telling you a few trade secrets... if you're interested in winning honey contests and all the glory that entails.
Here are a few things you need to know:
First, it helps to know the judge.
Second, it helps to pay off the judge.
Third, and most important, it definitely helps to be the only entrant in a category. This one is critical.
C'mon Crawfords, Snokes, Kellers, Jim and Cindy... where are you?

We started pulling spring honey about June 10th. As I said, it was a great crop. We should have nearly enough to get us through the markets for another year. As you know, we don't wholesale this (Sorry Whole Foods customers).

On most occasions, rolling another load into the honey house, the kids had to have samples.

I learned something this year. In the past I have attributed the bulk of the spring honey to the black locust flow:

A little locust bloom, but not much.

But this year the locust bloom was very spotty. Not nearly enough to make a big honey crop.

Where did all this honey come from? It tastes almost exactly the same as spring honey in past years.

Ah, here we go:

The bush honeysuckle bloomed out this spring like I've never seen.

And the bees just went to town.

Of course the russian olive probably has some influence also:

For about a week, this invasive shrub is a favorite of mine. When they're in full bloom, the air just turns to sugar. There's a half mile stretch near Deer Creek Lake that I run by, close my eyes and float through a ball of cotton candy.

Then I open my eyes and dodge cars.

The spring honey is translucent white, beautiful as ever. Come on out to the markets this July 5th. If there's anything left after the fireworks, spend that flag waving money with us! You can try all three seasons:

One from this year, fresh off the hives, two from last.

Of course there's more than just honey...

See you there!

The Easy Way

-Posted by Isaac

So if you want bees and you need them fast, you can always go buy them.
About three weeks ago that's exactly what we did. Back to Georgia, back to Gardners...
First, I thought we just had to take a morning with babysitter Libby and get all the previous year's packages cleaned up:

I knew that we'd get a little money on returns and thought that they'd appreciate these boxes coming back in primo condition.

After a few hours of cleaning I got the bright idea to call my beekeeper friend Dave Heilman and ask what Gardners was giving for returned boxes this year...
"Zero. Nada. Zilch. They quit doing that. Too many damaged boxes, and they can build them cheaper then cleaning them up. Now they just throw them on the burn pile."

Oops. Sorry kids.
They made a nice Ohio bonfire. Super clean.

The reason for the trip (this late in the year) is that I had a Florida nuc deal fall through. 120 nucs (baby beehives) made it up here right on time, April 15th. But I had needed 260! I had requested 260! The rest? They wouldn't be coming until mid-June. I was originally told mid-May. Communication was becoming a real issue with this deal, and three more weeks of uncertainty was just too much. Time to change plans.

So I hit the road on a spry June 1st afternoon having ordered 100 packages from Gardners. I had called five different places in Georgia and Florida, Gardners being the only one able to fill a larger order that quickly.
An hour or two in, it dawned on me that this route was hauntingly familiar. At least this time I wasn't driving through a snowstorm.
I elected to take our small piece-of-crap Ranger. Why? Better gas, better radio... and beyond all reasonable expectations, the truck just refuses to die.
Here is the West Virginia state capital seen through my busted and bird splattered windshield:

The irony was not lost. At some point on the trip it did occur to me that the cargo was worth way more then the motorized courier. Like 10 times as much! Really, I had no business hauling bees in that piece of junk. But it did the job. And it will still go 85 mph. Downhill.

I arrived a little early and had the chance to watch my order being put together.
Here are the queens:

These guys make fast work of it.

There were about 20 employees running around the day I loaded up. Four crews are involved with the shaking of package bees. Each crew has a truck and a swinger:

Everything seemed to run like a well oiled machine.
Which is what you'd expect. They had been at it for about three months. One guy told me that Gardners sold some 60,000 packages this year!

On the flip-side, they also do honey. I nosed around a little while and found the honey house:

A crew of four was in full swing.

Outside, a pile of broken frames gave a few scattered hives a delicious Georgia breakfast:

Sure beats grits!

In the office, Gardners had a line up of honeys from around the country:

They don't have to seek these out. Customers bring them! There are at least 100 bottles up there, honey of all types. I would love to sample some of these.

Well, I know what at least two of them taste like...

1500 miles in 36 hours. Long trip, little sleep.

I did sneak a few hours in before the big day of package installation. 100 packages in a single day makes for a long one, but the first 40 were easy:

These 40 hives are building up in Holmes county (Amish Country) at the moment. We took them up last week to work a couple patches of buckwheat which should be coming into bloom very soon. We'll keep you updated on this experiment as it unfolds.

So there you are... the easy way of making increase, albeit expensive.

The Hard Way

-Posted by Isaac

It's not all fun, games and complaining about things here on the bee farm. At times we've actually had to work. One of the most pressing and important jobs in the spring is making increase. Meaning, building up our hive count. Why?
Before last month's tirade about farm chemicals, you'll remember I was going off about another subject-- the dreadfully cold winter. And the corresponding bee death. We lost a lot of bees!
I found this picture in Smithsonian Magazine:

Look closely at where that icy blue plume is sitting. This was our second polar vortex.
Wow. Go figure.
The only logical conclusion: God hates the Midwest.
And our little honeybees too!

So we needed to build up our bees.
There's an easy way and a hard way to do this. We do both. This post is about the hard way: making splits.

To start, you need a queen.

No, a decent laying queen is not always necessary. You can graft, you can introduce cells, you can make a "dirty split." (Forcing the bees to make their own queen)
But in this area, middle of May, a laying queen is the way to go if you want to catch the summer honey flow. We give the California based Koehnen company a lot of business.

The queens can go to the bee yard with you, but you don't want to leave them in the hot cab of the truck.

Don't Do This!

Keep them cool in the shade... but not directly under the truck tire!
 I have cooked queens. I have run over queens.

The equipment for the new splits gets laid out first. This was a yard of 17 decently strong hives.

I ended up driving off with 14 decently strong splits.

I really enjoy the actual splitting process. I offhandedly commented to Jayne one evening about this-- "It's one of the few things in beekeeping that isn't dumb repetitive labor... splitting takes a little skill, a little experience."
One of my favorite jobs and I love it.
Every hive holds its own surprise. Sometimes you're surprised with a big early box of spring honey!

Sometimes the surprise is an unbelievably awesome queen.
Dan Williams has been showing off his brood (strong queens) on Facebook. Thought I'd show you one of mine... she can rival the best of them:

I pulled a frame thinking, wow... good pattern, no swarm cells...
Pulled the next frame--- even better!

At this point I was thinking, Man... I'd really love to meet this girl...

Pulled the next frame. Lo and behold:

"If you got the money, honey, I got the time!"

This hive was definitely a splitter.
Making a strong split involves three or four frames of brood, some pollen, some honey... and it's sure nice to know where the queen is.
Sometimes you find her, sometimes you don't.
The new queen obviously goes where the old one isn't.

It's important to record what you've done:

What the devil?!??

What is this strange cryptic beekeeper code?

About three hours later-- all done.

Hive count is on the increase and another bee yard is out of swarm danger.

For now.

Next we'll look at the easy way of making increase.

Angels and Prostitutes

-Posted by Isaac

Last year I had the pleasure of sitting in the audience while a beekeeper named John Miller gave a talk about his operation. Here he's promoting a wonderful read by Hannah Nordhaus:


Yes, Miller is somewhat famous. In the small world of beekeeping, that is.
He's also funny and very insightful. He got talking about pollination and the great service that honeybees do for humanity.
"Bees are known as the 'angels of agriculture.' That may very well be... but it doesn't fit us... their keepers. If bees are the angels, I'd have to say beekeepers are a closer fit with prostitutes. The dirty whores of agriculture."
Miller walked back and forth across the conference room, clicking powerpoint slides in quick succession. He was talking about pollination season in the California almonds.
"See if you follow me: -We're dirty. Most of us, I mean. Showers and suits are not on top of the priority list, you know?  -We frequent cheap motels. -We come and go at any ungodly hour of the night. -We work by night, we're gone by morning. -We take their money for services preformed. -And we like quick cash..."
He had the audience laughing. He had me thinking back about my own California almond experience. Yep... the prostitutes of agriculture.

I for one, enjoy the work. I really do. It's kinda hard when you're not set up with hives on pallets like we were in California. These days every hive is lifted by hand, put up on the truck.

And it really is an all night job, as Miller alluded.

But it's important. I love the feeling that what I'm doing matters. Without bees in the orchards, the vegetables, the nuts, the berries... there's a lot less of the good stuff in the diet. Pollination is a valuable service. And it's not like there's a beekeeper around every corner with a couple hundred hives. So it's nice to feel needed.

This year we took 120 strong hives into the apples:

At the Lynd Fruit Farm the trees were a few days away from bloom.

Most of the hives were scattered throughout the orchard on hay wagons. Here, and at the Bachman Fruit Farm.

The bees worked diligently.
Between sun,

and moon.

A little apple pollination perk, courtesy of Lester Lynd:

Thanks, Lester!

The bees returned home after a couple of weeks. Just in the nick of time for our flowering crabapple.

Another sweet perk of apple pollination:

Strong hives! Many were heavy with honey.

Some of the hives were taken directly to the out-yards where we hope they'll make a good crop of spring honey. Others were promptly loaded back up about a week later and taken south.

The Bainbridge area has a large Amish and Mennonite settlement. And these folks grow a lot of produce.

Ah, those Happy Industrious Mennonites.

Much of which needs bees.
I spent an enjoyable morning driving around with Mr. Zimmerman, placing bees on vine crops.

Beautiful area.
Most growers knew exactly where they wanted the bees.
One guy was ready with a hive stand:

And these guys left little doubt:

Hope they work hard!
The bees, I mean.