A Midsummer Night's Dream

-Posted by Isaac

The bee farmers are busy.
Allow me to take you on a pictorial tour covering the last seven exciting days and (dreamy?) nights.

We start with two days of hiking and camping in Shawnee State Forest down by the Ohio River.

Great Fun

Soccer, marshmallows and evening movies. We really got back to nature.

Then it was time for two days in Amish country.

(Young Daniel Mast hones the very skills he will someday use to navigate the competitive and increasingly tech reliant global marketplace.)

We were the featured speakers at an Amish beekeeping meeting.

Leave hats at the door, please... 

Had to rush home for the first day of school!

Actually, I had to rush home for some pumpkin pollination... the night before school.
Circle S Farms called while we were camping. Desperate for bees... The pumpkins were starting to bloom!
Tuesday night I delivered 30 strong hives.
(Here I come to save the day!)

Daybreak in the Pumpkins

(Now get out that checkbook.)

And a sore back to show for it.

I made it home to see our boy genius on the bus.

Then went out to to pull honey.

Then took a nice long nap.

The nap was required because that night a semi-famous beekeeper was giving a talk.
Randy Oliver was in town!

I annoyed him with questions about neonics and CCD.


The Next Day...
The comb honey yard needed attention.

We gleaned several Ross-Rounds supers,

And a few cut-comb boxes.

(It occurs to me, I should probably do a blog post about this.)

That night, more Randy Oliver!

This was at the Dawes Arboretum in Newark. He talked right up until 9 pm, and took no questions. I had a ton of them... he got lucky!

The Newark thing worked out nicely because I finished the night off by driving back up to Amish country. I was late with the mite treatment for the thirty five hives we have up there. (Beekeeping from a hundred miles away sometimes poses problems.)

Look at what is starting to bloom up there:

Goldenrod!

Back home again.
More summer honey to pull.
In this batch I looked for a nice full frame to enter at the upcoming Lithopolis Honeyfest.
Is there a winner in there?

Saturday, after the markets, it was time for another hiking / camping trip.
This time in beautiful Athens County.

We made a visit to the very cool Moonville abandoned train tunnel.

And noticed the bees really working the joe pye weed.

That's good, because there was a lot of it down there!
Just beautiful.

I love "the sticks."

Our friends, Mike and Angie, recently moved to the "sticks" of Athens County.
Bought themselves some acreage, and promptly began restoring this old barn.

It was Mike's 40th birthday.

An old barn given new life. A milestone birthday. Such momentous events called for a fantastic party.

And they threw one.

A real "barn burner."

Ha Ha.

I actually turned in at 11:00. Just couldn't hang with those 40 year old whippersnappers.

But our kids came ready to party.
First they did a lot of drinking.

Then got totally sloshed.

And reckless.

And belligerent...

...but they seemed to sleep it off all right.
Smiles and Mama.
By morning it was all just a hazy dream.

Summer Honey - The Journey

-Posted by Isaac

It's harvest time. For the past two weeks I've been pulling the summer honey. It's gorgeous this year. Beautiful and light. On the right is this year's Summer:

We seem to have a fan of last year's honey.

 It's a decent crop. Not incredible, but it sure beats the misery of last summer, which was a mere 27 lb / hive average. We have at least doubled that and we've still got the coming goldenrod this fall.
Two or three bee yards and about a thousand pounds of extracted honey per day has been status quo of late. If we can keep this up until the end of August we'll keep the kids in clothes for another year.

The clover went crazy this year, as some of you have mentioned.

I think this may be the reason this year's summer honey is lighter. More clover, less thistle and soybean? I don't know... it tastes about the same. It's definitely been drier this summer. But still cool. One of these years it may actually hit 90 degrees-- then we'll really have a crop!

During last year's summer honey extraction I showed you some of the different forage that the bees seek out... from flower nectar turned into honey. Now we'll take a tour of the honey processing... from hive to table.
Here are some pictures taken over the last few days.

A bee yard: ten to twenty hives depending on the surrounding forage. We're up to 29 bee yards.
The upper boxes are the honey supers-

Just as it is with people, some are go-getters...

...and some are slouches.

Don't you wish they could all be Boomers?

So the honey-laden supers are taken off the hives and loaded on the truck. Some days are harder then others. I won't get into the specifics.
This load happened to come off the golf course:

They hate it when I drive across the greens.

But it's so fun!

The honey gets stacked in the drying room / hot room. This year, most of the honey has been coming in at 16.5 to 17.5% moisture. No drying required.

The stack can get pretty high when we get behind on the extracting.

Eventually the frames come out and are run through the uncapper. This takes the outside wax capping off the honey so that the extractor can "sling" it out of the honeycomb cells.

Petyn and Bridger- our honey models.

The liquid honey goes into a large settling tank...

And is drained into buckets or barrels at the end of the day:

Light, Pure, Raw... High Quality Honey!

 If we turn our heads just a second, Bridger takes an opportunity to sample.

The boy is uncontrollable.

The honey is weighed,

And put into storage.

Here it awaits bottling. Could be now, could be next year...

The wax capping I mentioned earlier takes another journey.
The honey-soaked wax drains for a day or two...

...then is taken out to the bees. 

Honey bee cappuccino.

I have resisted buying a cappings spinner because I like watching this.

They chew on this little treat for another day or two, "fluff it up," and the loose wax gets rendered, filtered and poured into bucket molds:

From this point it can take about any form.

One thing we've been doing lately is dipped candles.
The wax is remelted:

And the wicks are "dipped" over and over.

Jayne will explain this in depth on a future post.

Back to the honey...

Empty frames go back into the supers.

Some "wet" supers go directly back on the hives with the hope that the bees will fill them with fall honey.

Others are cleaned out by the lucky bees here at home.

 What a morning treat!
They make short work of it.

For store shelves and the markets, the honey is pumped into the bottling tanks, never heated above the natural temperature of a beehive (we never go above 100 degrees), and strained through a cloth filter. The fabric still lets the pollen grains through and under this low heat, the honey remains raw with the enzymes intact.

The summer honey takes other forms. 

It's the one we use for the granulated, spreadable honey. It is also bottled around chunks of comb and sold as chunk honey. 

And it can be steeped with herbs for a couple of weeks and turned into infused honey:

All material for future blog posts.

So unti next time...

Enjoy!

Maizy likes her summer honey with Lucky Cat bread.

Back to the Neonicotinoids

 -Posted by Isaac

Back on the warpath.
The whole neonic controversy has been back in the forefront of my mind lately. There are a few recent happenings which have gotten me thinking about it, and I'm going to share with you.
For one, the bees are bringing in a lot of corn pollen:


For those of you unfamiliar, neonicotinoids are a relatively new class of pesticides that are used to treat corn and soybean seed, among many other things. Specifically, something called clothianidin on corn.
These are different than the old style insecticides in that they are systemic, meaning carried with the plant as it grows. It's not a one shot, short period ordeal as far as killing insects. It's a many days or months ordeal. The controversy surrounding neonics involves the argument that the chemical remains in the environment for too long and damage is caused to way more than just the target pest. They have been banned in Europe and may soon be outlawed in Canada due to evidence that the chemicals are wreaking havoc on pollinator populations.

If your livelihood depends on keeping insects alive and those insects happen to be foraging on a neonic treated plant, it tends to make you worry:

I'm not an alarmist.
And I don't want to be. I follow and almost always side with Randy Oliver at scientificbeekeeping.com.  Oliver is a commercial beekeeper in California and in my opinion a top tier scientist. He basically says, of yet, there is no overwhelming evidence that neonics are causing the harm many are claiming. I read his research and always feel better about life... we can continue to put faith in the system, the science, the testing and the fact that there are many intelligent people working on this.

On the other hand...

Some things make me wonder.

Are we really looking that hard?

Many of us carry a nervous and suspicious outlook regarding our regulatory agencies. Specifically the EPA and ODA here in Ohio. There are reasons for this. Allow me to expand-
I got the lab results back from my May bee kill. The conclusion... drum roll... NO CONCLUSION!
Well, not exactly. The lab did find evidence of nosema in a few of the samples and no varroa was found. But??? But??? What about the dead bees from the pesticide? This was a PESTICIDE RELATED KILL! In small print near the bottom of the page it said that the samples were not tested for chemical toxins.
So what was the point? Come on ODA? Nosema and varroa? Whoop de do.
I would normally just write this off as a gross oversight or miscommunication, but as a beekeeper with growing suspicions, I now have some real doubts. Remember 2012? Major bee kills statewide during corn planting.

This continues to happen!

A whole state's worth of dead bee samples coming in and the news given back to beekeepers that spring was that the bees were dying of starvation! Later that year in the fall beekeepers got word that the many samples had been run and nothing was found. Again, ODA, do your job!
Well, this was a real head scratcher. No link between corn planting and dead bees? Bees dying of starvation? (In big piles in front of the hives?) Interestingly Bayer CropScience, the vanguard of bee health, took the same stance... the bees were starving. What a freakin' joke!

Things like this begin to make you wonder. Will I too be crushed beneath this wheel?

I mentioned that neonic use has been banned in Europe. Why is this? In another post I got ranting that the moratorium was probably not done on a whim. You don't just turn your back on billions. This was revenue, progress, technology and jobs... and they put a stop to it. Wouldn't there have to be some hard scientific evidence to make a decision this big? Truth is, I don't know... did they simply ban the chemicals because beekeepers were mad?

There has, of course, been a lot of testing with neonics. For one, the companies that produce the stuff, namely Bayer CropScience, have put the insecticides though years of "rigorous" field studies and find that "when used according to label specifications" the chemicals are harmless to bees. (Lethal to the target insect but harmless to others.  Hahaha.)
Clothianidin has been used extensively on corn since the early 2000's. Oddly enough, something called CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) also happened in the early 2000's. CCD is the unexplained and massive die off of honeybees that cannot be attributed to varroa mite, nosema, foulbrood or any other common and widely known bee affliction. The beekeeping industry took a nosedive.
There has since been a slow if not stagnant recovery. CCD is still largely unexplained, but commercial beekeepers persist nonetheless.
There is much more splitting of hives these days. Re-queening. Feeding syrup. Feeding protein. Treating. Treating again. And again. General hive maintenance.... more than has ever been required in the past. You can still keep bees alive, it's just much harder!

The most rigorous, cruel and damning neonic field studies were of course the involuntary experiments conducted on commercial beekeeping operations. Here were people who had spent generations taking care of bees and suddenly they couldn't keep their hives alive. Many were screaming about the new pesticides. Many were pointing fingers directly at Bayer, Monsanto, Syngenta and the EPA... with little action taken. They're still pointing, bees are still dying. The EPA is still "working on it."

Taking the advice of three different commercial guys (In New York, Pennsylvania and Iowa) I'm feeding a lot of protein this summer.

This is not a normal practice for summer hive maintenance, but these guys say they've had more success when "diluting" the incoming poisons. ("Poisons"...meaning corn pollen)
The bees seem to eat it right up but I have not observed any of it being stored in cells.
The clover and corn pollen however, is easily found.
The bees are still looking good. Nice solid brood patterns, plenty of honey on the hives... I truthfully don't see adverse effects on hive health due to corn pollen.

So am I worried about nothing?

I've got the Power!

Something old... Something new...

-posted by Jayne

Wedding bells must be ringing somewhere off in the distance, as I've sold quite a few of these little 2 oz honey jars as wedding favors lately.  I got to thinking about some of our products here and how the phrase, "Something old, something new..." definitely applies to us.  Not sure about the borrowed and blue part... but I'll take you through the old and new:

Something old... we've had these little two ounce honey jars for a while now...

But the honey will never spoil, so why not keep a few wedding favors back for enjoying on your 40th wedding anniversary?

Something new:  Lots of new soap scents!

This scent was a completely new creation and we love it!  The rose clay is a type of kaolin clay that is great for purifying the skin.  Find it for sale here in our Etsy store.

Why not have a beer in the shower?

 We sell honey to Seventh Son Brewing Company, so I thought to myself... if they are making beer with our honey, why not make some soap using their beer?  The beer increases the lather of the soap, while also giving it that earthy robust brewed scent.  You can find it for sale here in our Etsy shop.

Five Clay soap - a thick blend of five different clays swirled together to make a thick creamy lather, great for the face or an all over body soap.

Other new scents not pictured here are Activated Charcoal (with Eucalyptus and Rosemary essential oil), Lilac Blossom, Bergamot Grapefruit, and Coconut Lime.

Something old: Castile Soap.  I finally managed to get it photographed to list in our Etsy shop, although I have been making it and selling it for over a year now.  The base is 100% olive oil, which makes it great for sensitive skin and babies.  I use it in our youngest daughter's hair as a shampoo and it works great since it leaves no residue and has a very simple lather, with small bubbles and a fresh, natural scent.

Something new:  A honeystick variety package.  This has been a hit at the farmer's market.  We count out 8 each of the Fall, Lavender, and Summer honeysticks and package them up so you can try each flavor.  I've been selling out of these at the Worthington market every week.  

Something new:  Letter-block candles.  I created my own molds using a silicone mold making compound.  I bought the silicone materials last July.  I finally got around to making the molds this January.  I still haven't gotten these listed in my Etsy shop.  But I did get them photographed!  

Why not spell out your true feelings in candlelight?

Or top a cake with your son's name?

Something new:  Salves!  We now have Baby Balm, Herbal Healing Salve, and Farmer's Friend salve.  They each have a unique purpose, whether it is healing a cut or scrape, soothing dry skin, or calming the itch from an insect bite.  I will be listing them in our Etsy shop soon, but for now you can find them at our farmer's market locations.

Something old...  I was sorting through some old papers and came across this letter from Mrs. Helen Ingram of Washington Courthouse.  Together with her late husband Beecher Ingram she ran "Ingram's House of Honey."  When Isaac and I first got into beekeeping we purchased some old beekeeping equipment from her and her son.  We would sit and chat with her about Beecher and their business, and she always commented how they were unable to sell the Fall honey that they harvested.  She said the taste was too strong for their customers, and she wouldn't even bake with it because the flavor was just too intense.  What she was referring to was the same taste that many of our customers have come to know and enjoy - Fall goldenrod honey.  As you can see in the letter below, they did enjoy eating it fresh on pancakes, waffles, and toast.  

   Helen was 84 when she wrote us this letter and I regret to say we haven't kept in touch with her in recent years.  But it is a good feeling to know that we are still using much of the equipment we purchased from her in our early years of beekeeping.  I believe she would be proud to see something old being used to produce "something new" again, by our little beekeeping family here at Honeyrun Farm.

Many Fish Bites If You Got Good Bait

-Posted by Isaac

We've been recreating.

Here's a little fishing tune to enjoy while you recreate with us. (Sorry if there's an ad, but what Jayne was able to do on that last post is just so time consuming!) (It was Jayne who worked the "play button" magic, not I.)

So if you're a Taj fan as I am, you know that this silly song is not only about fishing... it's a life philosophy. Listen close!

Working toward that good bait in Holmes County:

 One night a little more then a month ago, these 40 hives were given a ride to Amish Country.

It's about a three hour trip up to Jayne's beautiful homeland.

 North of Columbus, 3 a.m., I enjoyed a virtual fireworks display of lightning. About as intense as I've ever seen. Thankfully the storm was over the Canton area, 20 miles north of where I needed to drop bees.

By morning I had all the hives situated.
Two big locations, one small with only five hives. All were within easy flying distance of buckwheat.

We're going to see what happens. These are the "Buckwheat Babies."
Started from package bees in early June, we're hoping they'll make a super or two of dark rich honey.

Buckwheat!

This was planted in June. (Thanks Merle Sommers and Ken Gerber!) We should end up seeing at least two blooms, maybe three if we're lucky. 

Although Jayne told me to, I forgot to take pictures this week. The buckwheat is now tall and bloomed out as white as snow. The bees are working it hard... at least carrying loads of pollen in.

And between buckwheat blooms, the bees have plenty to keep them busy:

Ah, Holmes County. A veritable Garden of Eden.

And now back to the fish.

Before we left for Amish Country, our bee club, Scioto Valley Beekeepers, had their annual hog roast and picnic out at the Clark's farm.
As always, fun time, lots of people, lots of beekeeping fibs and tall tales.

But our kids were more interested in fish than hog. Bob and Karen Clark graciously provided fishing poles, and, as it turned out, good bait:

 Mason and Bridger caught a few and took it all in stride.

Maizy on the other hand,

                                     ...did a touchdown dance.

Singin' many fish bites if you got good bait

Here's a little tip that I would like to relate 

Many fish bites if you got good bait 

 I'm a goin' fishin',

 yes I'm goin' fishin'

And my baby goin' fishin' too!