A Happy Marriage--How Sweet It Is!

Family vacations are wonderful. I love planning for them, doing the driving, getting there and exploring a new place, and then feeling ready to come home and sleep in my own bed again. All of the preparation can be very stressful, especially when one is planning menus and food shopping, but the efforts are well worth the result: time away from electronics focused on playing, hiking, laughing, and hanging out as a family. And all of the above is my excuse for being away from my blog for so long. Somebody commented recently about how not writing on her blog very much meant that she is busy having experiences worth writing about.

I didn't actually get to check on my honeybees, then, for about two and a half weeks. This last Friday I finally donned my gear and, with Owen's help this time (the kids are enthusiastically taking turns with helping me do a hive inspection), opened up the hives to see what the girls have been up to. Quite a lot, as it turns out. Honey production has kicked into high gear now. The upper "deep" (a hive body that is 9.5 inches deep; these boxes are where the baby bees are raised) is mostly full of honey. That will be for the bees' winter stores. There was some capped brood -- bee larvae changing into grown up bees -- on a frame or two, but it's mostly honey. Did you know that the honey has to dehydrate a certain amount before the bees cap it? Once the honey is capped then it is ready for human consumption. The lower deep showed bands of honey across the upper sections of many of the frames, but those are mostly for baby bees. There was not quite as much capped brood this time as I have seen. I don't know whether to worry about this, but maybe the bees are more focused on creating honey.

Remember how I wrote about putting newspaper down between the two deeps when I combined the hives three weeks ago? There wasn't an iota of newspaper left inside the hives when I looked in there on Friday. The bees has chewed it all up and cleaned it completely out. Owen helped me offset the deeps from each other so they don't match up exactly up and down. The upper deep is offset a quarter inch forward so there is a gap. This is to provide ventilation to the interior of the hive in the hot weather we are now having. This helps the bees fanning the honey to get it dehydrated to just the right percentage. I added a honey super (a box with 10 frames in it that is 6.5 inches high) offset from the top deep. Any honey the bees store in there will be mine at the end of the summer. I don't know that I will get very much because the bees have to draw out comb on the frames before they can start storing any honey on them. Hopefully I will be getting a queen excluder in between the super and the deep this week. That will prevent the queen from going up into the honey super to lay eggs in there.

And my smoker stayed lit almost the whole time this time. I'm getting better with that thing. It would probably help if I could examine my hive more quickly. It was slow-going this time because of all of the propolis (PROP-uh-liss) the bees created to glue things together. It's yellow and extremely sticky. I don't know if it ever dries out and gets hard, but it's malleable. We had to pry carefully but with some energy to get the deeps to separate and pry the frames apart.

So my little urban farm is coming right along. The bees have made a noticeable difference in the amount of strawberries and raspberries that have been ripening this year. I've loved being a beekeeper so far. The flora part of my little farm exploded in the week we were gone (more on that soon) and it was quite the weeding fest we had this last week. But I can see baby beans, cukes, and beets out there. And yesterday I picked the first zucchini of the year. That means there will be vegetable omelets for dinner tonight! Yum. Now if only those chickens would start doing their duty and lay eggs.