When all the flowers are a-bloom, and the bees are up to strength and are working their hardest, that’s the time of the year beekeepers refer to as “honeyflow”.  Right now, we’re well into it. Today I visited my new hive at Gravel Creek, to see how the colonies are coming along. My hopes for them are modest, since they are just starting this year: get a lot of comb built, store enough honey to last through the winter, build up enough bees to thrive and survive.  I don’t really expect much if any honey from the newbies.

Sometimes, though, my expectations are exceeded. The second hive I opened today was literally exploding with bees, and packed to the gills with honey. Wow! So fast! I put a super (honey box) on top, so they can keep up the good work. I went into all 11 of the new hives, and was pleased to discover that 7 of them were in this state. Amazing.

I did notice something odd, though. Look closely at the picture. The hives that are taller are the ones that were doing so well that I had to add extra boxes. They are also, with the exception of one, the hives with north-facing entrances. I don’t know what to make of this. Does a south facing entrance hamper the bees somewhat? I will have to pay attention further. A further point of interest is that in the old apiary, all of the hives have the entrances oriented north.  Maybe I will turn the south facing hives around.

I went to an interesting workshop last weekend on queen breeding. For all you non-beekeeper readers, that’s a subspecialty of beekeeping, where you select and raise queen bees. This is one of the cornerstones of what beekeeping is all about, because it’s how humankind has been breeding specific strains of bees for centuries, much like we’ve  bred dogs for retrieving and cows for better milk production. In the case of bees, we breed to get bees that sting us less, make more honey, survive the winter better, and in the last decade, we’ve been working to breed bees that are resistant to the varroa mite. The process is fairly complicated, involving careful timing, manual dexterity, and a good understanding of bee biology and lifecycle. Few beekeepers do it, leaving it mostly to beekeepers that specialize in the process. For me, it’s the last great frontier of beekeeping knowledge that I’ve not yet explored.

Our county beekeeper club, of which I am the current vice president, has decide as a group that we want to start a regional bee breeding program. The idea is that we’ll work to breed a strain of bees that is better adapted to our wet maritime climate. Pretty ambitious stuff, but we have the support and encouragement of some very knowledgeable people with PhDs in this sort of thing at the OSU Bee Research Lab. Four or five of us are attending to seminars, but everyone else in the group has volunteered to take the queens we raise, field test them, and give us data in return. It’s a multi-year project with a lot of people involved, and it should be very exciting.

The conference itself was not long, but packed with information. They held it at the OSU Bee Research Station, a cool place I’ve mentioned before. In the picture above, one of the lecturers is demonstrating a tiny (and particularly cute) miniature beehive used for queen mating. In the background is the funny part, though. We were told to bring our protective gear to the seminar, but the first half of the day was classroom stuff so we all left our veils in our cars to begin with.  Right after lunch, though, the seminar sort of spontaneously restarted as we were all standing around yakking. The main speaker brought over a hive of bees, popped it open, and pulled out a frame of comb as he was talking, bees zinging around everywhere. These beekeeper gatherings are hilarious, because if you did that in a crowd of 30 normal people, you’d have screams of terror and people running around like their hair was on fire. Here, nope. I’ll be honest, I dislike getting stung, and normally wear a lot of protective gear.  A few people (like me) looked around kindof nervously, but everyone else was like, “ho, hum” and taking notes. The speaker chuckled, and then let the newer half of us in on the joke… the hive he was working had been set up two days before as a breeding hive, which means that they pulled frames of “house bees” (bees less than 2 weeks old) and brood, and separated them into this smaller breeder hive. House bees have not-yet-fully-developed venom sacs, and are also instinctively disinclined to sting. Or even fly much, for that matter. But I’ll be honest: a few minutes later when I found myself holding a frame of brood in one hand and a grafting tool in the other, bent over this open hive, bees crawling on my arms and neck, I was sweating.

In all, a great seminar, and I’m excited to start raising my own queens. But it will have to wait until next spring; my new hives are all too young for this , and I’m also far too busy with the house that we’re still not living in yet. But it was cool to get the knowledge, and now I have time to get prepared to jump into queen rearing in 2015.

One of the things that I like about our farm is that it has a social aspect. Growing vegetables is (or, rather, can be) a relaxing, pensive pursuit. It’s nice to be out in the countryside, looking at the green mountains, smelling the fresh air, chatting with your buddies while you have your hands in the earth. We have several friends that like to come out to help, just for the chance to do this therapeutically. And we appreciate the help; there are a lot of green things to go in the ground right now, and summer seems to be here for real. It’s been sunny and in the 80s here all week (a heat wave!).

In other news, I tried a new method to sample varroa mite infestation in my bees. It’s supposedly more accurate than the “24-hor drop” method, where you count dead mites stuck onto a special sampling board in the bottom of the hive. The new “powdered sugar roll” works like this: you scoop up 100ml of bees (about 300) into a special jar, coat them with a tablespoon of powdered sugar, then roll them around in it for a minute or two. The sugar dislodges any mites, then you count them in the bottom of a basin, getting a really accurate mite-to-bee ratio. This is better becuase it automatically accommodates hives with widely varying populations of bees, unlike the 24-hour drop method. And you get a very funny side effect: ghost bees! But not to worry, their friends clean them off and eat the sugar. As you might imagine, the bees hate it and it gets them well pissed off. But it’s better for them than the earlier “alcohol roll” method, which is very similar to the powdered sugar roll except you roll them in alcohol, killing the bees as a side effect.