Category: Beekeeping

  • How to Winterize Bees

    How to Winterize Bees

    How To Winterize Bees - lifefromthegroundup.us

    As fall draws to a close and winter approaches, it’s time to think about how you’re going to winterize your bees. Bees are pretty hardy (they manage to do just fine in the wild without us), and some more temperate areas may not need to do anything at all. But if you live someplace like northern Ohio that almost always bottoms out near or below zero during the winters, then it might not be a bad idea to give them a little help.

    That being said, take it with a grain of salt from me. I’ve had bees for the past two winters, and neither hive survived, so I can’t claim to be an expert. Both winters, they were doing fine well into the new year. The first time, the hive got toppled (likely by one of the dogs, but also possibly a polar bear). Last year, we had a late visit in March from the polar vortex that may have done them in. But, I didn’t do anything to winterize the first two years, so I’m going to give it a shot this winter and see if I have any better success.

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  • How to Clean Beeswax for Use in Everyday Products

    How to Clean Beeswax for Use in Everyday Products

    Yeah, not the most glamorous of subjects, but when you harvest honey, you’ll end up with wax. I suppose you could just not worry about it and pitch it outside, but beeswax is useful stuff to have around. Clean beeswax is even more useful. Here’s how to clean beeswax so you can use it in just about anything.

    Unfortunately, even if you melt it to separate it from the last bits of honey, there will probably still be some junk in it. If you’re making your own lip balms or ointments, you’ll likely want to use wax without the junk – luckily, this is pretty easy to remedy.

    How to Clean Beeswax - lifefromthegroundup.us

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  • Honey harvest

    The good news is that we ended up with about a gallon and a half of honey from the bees this year. Including the maple syrup, we’ve got quite a supply of all-natural sweeteners. Raw honey is still sugar, so nobody really recommends that you get carried away, but it does contain a lot not found in commercial, pasteurized honey, like vitamins, enzymes, and antioxidants, and is naturally anti-viral, anti-bacterial, and anti-fungal. Good stuff.

    Honey Harvest

    The bad news is that we have honey because the bees are dead. They were trucking along just fine until a few weeks ago, when their hive got knocked over. I suspect one of the dogs, but we also had pretty extreme winds for a while and the cinder block base was a little off-kilter from several freeze-thaw cycles. Alas, they served us well.

    I took the frames from the top box, but left the bottom body, so when we get new bees, they’ll have plenty to eat. Extractors are expensive, so I tried the uncap and drain method, but after a night of draining, I literally had about four drops. Those bees are pretty smart, and everything is designed so that the honey doesn’t just drip out after they put it in the cells. So I ended up gently scraping the comb off the foundation, then straining everything through a mesh colander. Really, it worked pretty great, and I also now have a bunch of beeswax to use.

    I never thought much of bees before (aside from the pollination thing), but they are really quite fascinating.

    Honey Harvest

  • Bees!

    We are now officially the proud owners of one bee hive. My family has had a couple for the past several years, and when my dad was ordering new bees, he ordered an extra and asked if I wanted it, so here we are. Not really on the schedule for this year, but most things around here don’t go by any kind of artificial schedule I have planned. And I’m okay with that… mostly.

    If you’re looking to get started with apiaries, the book Beekeeping for Dummies is a great reference, and where I got most of my initial information. Based on what I’ve read, this isn’t an overly time or labor-intensive hobby, and should be fun. I’ll have extra pollinators for the gardens, and maybe even get some honey in the fall.

    If you haven’t dealt with large quantities of bees before, it can be a little intimidating. Though honeybees are relatively docile (unlike yellow jackets and hornets), it’ll still get your heart pumping when you’re dumping out a box containing several thousand bees, and instinct is naturally telling you to keep them in the box where they’re (you’re) safe. It did end up being fun though, and getting to see inside the hive after they’ve been settled in for a couple weeks is pretty cool. Quite interesting little creatures.

    Look for more updates as the summer goes on!

    This is what they’re shipped in. Funny to see the mailman’s face…
    That’s a lot of bees.

    Starting to dump them into the hive.

     

    At home. Time to get to work.