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...

Things have calmed down here considerably since this weekend’s bee tornado , when our colony decided to split and swarm to create a second group of bees. Once they settled down and found their queen, they all clustered up on a sheltered post of our grape arbor:  This is a lot  of bees, and they wouldn’t stay there forever. Their next job was to look for a new place to build comb for a hive — a hollow log would be nice, but it’s just as likely that they would find a hole in a wall and build their nest in a house or garage. That’s not exactly good publicity for honeybees when it comes to the neighbors, so our job was to catch that swarm and give it a new home. To do that, I dug an old box out of the recycling bin and donned my bee suit to grab those bees and give them some shelter before the sun set. Kirk was called in to work, so I had to do it myself. This would have been better as a two-person job, since climbing on a chair and holding that box in one hand whil...

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...

On Monday when we did our weekly maintenance check of the hive , we had to remove some small pieces of comb that weren't positioned properly on the bar: Some, like the one above, had a bit of honey in them. Other pieces had big bee larvae, and still others had just tiny, new eggs. It's hard to take pictures once the bees get mad about you messing with their babies, but I'll try harder in the future.  Different pieces of comb also showed some variation in the color of the beeswax: The white is brand new wax, and it's quite soft and fragile--you can see it's all crushed around the edges from our hands, despite pretty careful handling. The larger one is more golden. Wax color depends a lot on what kinds of pollen the bees are foraging for--it gets mixed in when they produce the wax.  We also had a bit of bee bread in the large piece. You can see two pieces here on the edge of the comb, which has been partially torn away: Bee bread is po...

Yesterday Anita from Beverly Bees came by to check our hive. We suited up and got to work.  If you remember, we have a top bar hive . It's basically a big trapezoidal box with bars running across the top. The bees build honeycomb to hang from each bar. Our job is to check each bar to make sure they are building their comb nice and straight. We started from the back: You can tell by the pure white color of the beeswax comb that this is brand new, and it's still quite soft. Kirk easily spotted the queen on this one, though she crawled around to the back by the time I snapped the picture. The bees are building this to fill the box, and the queen is laying eggs in each little hole. Further down the line of bars, toward the hive entrance, there are completed combs that are much sturdier, which allows us to flip them upside down: This comb is nice and straight, and you can see that it has taken on the shape of the box. The part that looks solid yellow is whe...

On Friday Anita from Beverly Bees came back to check our hive. The queen had just stepped out of her cage , so Anita carefully got all the bees around the cage to walk off of her hands and onto the comb they had built. It turns out that our Italian bees are very gentle, and they didn't seem at all bothered by us pulling the roof off of their house and poking around.  We also filled their feeder with some 1:1 simple syrup that I made that morning: The feeder is just an upside-down Mason jar with holes poked in the lid so the syrup drips very slowly. It's balanced on a couple of blocks just high enough to let the bees crawl under and sip the droplets. This food is to give them something to eat while they build their first combs and start foraging for pollen and nectar of their own.  Today Kirk and I went out to the hive on our own to check the feeder. We suited up and gave a couple puffs of smoke, then moved the bars to see this: That's another comb...

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...