Port Potager

Back in August, our bees swarmed and broke themselves into a new hive. I caught the swarm and Kirk built a new top bar hive to house them. Since then, we’ve had two side-by-side hives.  We helped the new hive get started by feeding them some simple syrup so they’d have extra energy to build all the new honey comb they need. I’m not sure they needed our help, though. They built comb super-fast, and they now have 11 or 12 bars completely drawn in the space of just five weeks. It’s pretty clear that when the original hive swarmed, they sent out their best and brightest: all workers, and lots of them. We were worried about the new group having enough time to get their house in order for the winter, but they’re doing really well: This is just one of many combs that is heavily laden with honey. Capped honey (the white part at the top) is ready to go for their winter reserves. The center (where most of the bees are) is full of nectar that is ripening and should be cap...

As I alluded to ever-so-briefly in my previous post , our bee colony has collapsed. Through October they seemed to be doing fine, but when I checked in on a warm day earlier this month, it was eerily quiet. No bees at all at the entrance, and no humming of activity.  I opened the hive to find lots of gorgeous combs of capped honey, but no bees at all. No living ones, anyway. There were a few dead ones on the floor of the hive, and that was it. Thousands of bees had simply vanished into thin air.  Later we went through the hive to take some photos to send to our bee mentor for some insight on what could have happened to the colony. Here's what we found: Lots of comb that should have brood cells (baby bees in the comb) had nothing at all. The cells at the top are capped honey for winter, but the ones at the bottom have only a very spotty brood pattern (the parts that look like closed dots in the honeycomb). There are no eggs in the comb either, a sign that our q...

Last weekend when we checked the beehive, we saw that one of the combs was stuck to the bottom of the hive. We're thinking it must have fallen and then the bees reconnected it to the bar, but we had to remove it to keep them building comb in good, straight lines. So we cut it off of the box and decided to get a closer look once we closed up the hive: The part that Kirk is cutting off is actually the bottom of the comb. The solid yellow around the side and bottom (or shorter) edge is capped brood: cells that have bee larvae inside. Sorry, bees.  Here's one hatching. Can you see her little eyes looking straight up at you? (She's dead center in the photo.) To the left is more capped brood; to the right is uncapped honey, nectar, and bee bread .  Kirk cut off the brood sections because we are just not into eating bee larvae (yet). Fascinating cross section makes for an awesome biology project, though: In each cell you can see a semi-formed baby bee. T...

Honeybees! Our bees came today, and we got them installed into their new top bar hive. This looks pretty different from the tall, traditional Langstroth boxes you are probably familiar with (and maybe afraid of). This is a much simpler design — just an upside trapezoid with bars that line up across the top and a few holes for a front door: The bees will eventually build honeycomb that hangs from each bar, and it will be the shape of the box: This comb is from an established hive, but we added it to ours to give the bees a good start with a place to store nectar and lay eggs. It also provides them an example of how to build a nice, straight comb that will be easier for us to lift out of the hive for honey later. This is a (way too big for me) bee suit that I am currently borrowing from Anita and Brian Deeley at Beverly Bees . We weren't able to sign up for a beekeeping class this winter, so we were super-psyched to find Beverly Bee's Adopt-a-Hive...