Bee Log # 81

Beeswax: One Ounce Bar

The beeswax comes out of the molds beautifully. I made my first beauty product from the wax, mustache wax! A musician from the Phinney Farmers' Market was complaining that he has trouble buying mustache wax that he likes. I made some for him as a prototype.

Buckwheat Honey and Blackberry Honey

The two jars of honey above were harvested from the same 7 hives about one month apart. The lighter honey is blackberry honey and the darker honey is buckwheat with maybe some Japanese knotweed. We know the bees were in buckwheat because the farmer at the farm where we have our hives had planted buckwheat as a cover crop. We guess Japanese knotweed because it is blooming during August. The dark honey has a rich, fruity, plum like taste. The lighter honey has a clover and melon flavor.

Cooling Beeswax in One Ounce Molds

I invested in some beeswax molds so that I could market the beautiful beeswax that I am accumulating. When we harvest honey, we cut the wax cappings off of the frames in order to extract the honey. The wax cappings go into a solar wax melter (see earlier blog post: Bee Log 44: July 6, 2010 ). The wax is filtered through cheese cloth and collected in metal pans. I remelt the wax in a rice cooker purchased at Goodwill and pour the wax into the molds.

We will be at the Phinney Farmers' Market today, Friday, September 28 and October 5. We will be at the Queen Anne Farmers' Market on Thursday, October 11. Come taste our honey.

Bee Log #77

I have been in Hot Springs, Arkansas for the last 10 days due to a death in the family. The heat was intense. One day the official temperature in Little Rock was 111 degrees which was the third highest temperature ever recorded there. My 90 year old mother and I had to carefully plan (and ration) our outings because of the danger of the heat and the sun. I got chiggers. I did see honeybees. The honeybees must be suffering from the lack of nectar in the heat and drought. Actually, this will probably be a hard time for beekeepers over much of the southern two-thirds of the USA because of extreme drought conditions.

Here in wonderfully cool Seattle, we just had another harvest of honey. The new honey is primarily blackberry and linden (a non-native tree planted as a street tree in Seattle). Linden honey, a favorite of mine, has a wonderful citrus flavor. We plan to be at the Phinney Farmers' Market on Friday, August 3 at 3-7pm and at the Van Vuren Farm booth at the Shoreline Farmers' Market on Saturday, August 4 from 10 to 3. Our next scheduled visit to the Queen Anne Farmers' Market will be Thursday, August 16 from 3-7pm. Come taste our newest honey.

Bee log # 70

LOOKING FOR HONEY SOON!!! Shown is a jar of early season honey from two years ago. It is the beautiful, light, tasty honey that we get in Seattle if we harvest before mid-August. (After that we get tasty dark honey.) What flowers is it from? Big Leaf maple trees bloomed in mid-May. The bees were able to get out to forage during that time. The chestnut and then black locust trees bloomed after the maple. Right now the black locust is just finishing and the tulip poplars are starting to bloom as well as blackberry. Our Italian prune tree is loaded with fruit as are the raspberries so the bees were involved with back-yard fruit. The next anticipated bloom is linden sometimes called basswood or tilia trees. This is a non-native tree that is widely planted in Seattle as a street tree.

We have harvested our first honey from some hives on lower Queen Anne hill near SPU. We need to go around to all of our hives to check for honey stores to harvest. As of yet we have not had the weather or the time to do that. In addition to checking for honey when it warms up a little, we need to be ready to catch swarms. It has already been a banner swarm year for us and we expect more in the next week because of the blackberry. Bees like to swarm when they are at the beginning of a big nectar flow.

A few of our hives are not doing well but most are booming. Last night we removed a queen-less hive from a yard near Northgate and replaced it with a hive from our back yard. The Northgate hive must have a laying worker or an unmated queen because we saw eggs and brood but only drone (male) larva. (A worker bee sometimes can lay eggs but these eggs are unfertilized and will therefore develop into a drone or male bee.) We will combine those queen-less bees with a weak but queen-right hive that needs more bees to see if we can get one good hive. Probably both hives will die but they would die anyway and this gives them a chance.

I am learning about hive management through the school of experience. We have had a few hives end up queen-less this year because of swarming and not leaving a viable queen behind. Those hives, if we catch them while they are still full of workers, are better candidates for combining with another hive.

Bee Log 63: August 20, 2011

Yes! We have honey! It has been so cold this spring and summer in Seattle that I did not think that we would ever get honey. The bees have been packing it in. We took our first honey August 1 and got another harvest this last week. The result is honey to sell at the Phinney Farmers' Market on Friday evenings from 3pm to 7pm.

Our honey is tasty and unique. We are selling most of the honey by hive location. For instance, we have had a nice lot of honey from 98103, 98119 and 98125 so we sell that honey by zip code. We can only guess at the source of the honey because we know what was blooming before the harvest. I know blackberry is one of the components of the current honey as well as Linden trees and clover. Japanese knot weed will be next along with the little yellow dandelion things (I think a wild aster) currently blooming in yards around us. Each group of hives produces a unique taste. Honey is a bit like wine as each harvest has an individual taste.

We have been busy with our bees. 25 hives has us working about 2-3 days a week this time of year. Some of the hives are more productive than others. And the production in an individual hive varies through the season.

Come see us at the market if you live in Seattle. Phinney Farmers' Market is a smaller, family friendly market with a great selection of fruit and produce and a wonderful set of vendors.

Bee Log 62: July 26, 2011

Honey bee working a leek that has gone to flower


A full frame of honey that is almost ready. Note the whiter area along the top of the frame. That honey has a thin wax cap across the top indicating that the bees have decided that it has been sufficiently dehydrated. We take frames of honey from the bees when they are at least 80% capped. Go bees go!


A family, visiting from California, is watching my husband work a hive in our back yard. We love to educate people about bees when we get a chance.


I got stung on the leg two days ago. My body over-reacts to bee venom. So far treatment has consisted of ice, Benadryl, hydro-cortisone cream, and ibuprofen. I looked up some folk remedies and tried a few but I think I was too late for them to have any effect. Ice seems to give the most relief.

This has been a most frustrating summer for beekeepers and presumably for the bees. We have had cool overcast day after cool overcast day. I look at the weather across the nation and see the temperatures in many parts of the country hovering around a humid 95 to 100 degrees and am thankful I don't have to brave that but on the other hand, it does make beekeeping difficult when the bees can't get out to the flowers that I know are blooming. Our bees are finally able to bring in nectar in excess of their needs. We are seeing a lot of uncapped honey that we hope will be ready sometime this week of next week. The bees put a thin coat of wax over the cells of honey when they are dehydrated enough so the honey doesn't ferment.


We hope to be at the Phinney Farmers' Market on the first Friday in August.

Bee Log 61: July 4, 2011

These seven hives are at the Urban Horticulture Center on the University of Washington campus. The hive on the far right is the swarm hive that was featured in the previous blog. It is coming right along. The hive on the far left is the hive that swarmed. We know this because it ended up without a viable queen. The old queen flies off with the swarm. The remaining hive is left with queen cells (pupa cases) about to hatch another queen. That new queen must go around and kill the other queens about to hatch. If she misses one, then there is often a secondary swarm with an unmated queen. We did have a second swarm at that site so it could be that the hive ended up without a queen. Our last inspection of the far left hive showed that there were no eggs, no larva and no brood (pupa cases). That means no active queen.

Our options were to purchase a queen for $25 to $30, let nature take its course and possibly loose a strong hive with a lot of bees or combine that hive with another hive. We chose this last option combining the hive with a swarm that we caught at one of our host homes. We know that swarm had a queen because of the behavior of the bees as we captured the swarm.

To combine hives, we use the newspaper method. A sheet of newspaper is placed on top of the hive without a queen or with a queen we want to depose. Slits are made in the paper and the hive addition is placed on top. The bees set to work chewing up the paper giving them enough time to adjust to the new queen. If there are two queen, they fight for their throne with (we hope) the strongest, healthiest queen winning.

In the last 3 days, we have answered 4 swarm calls. We love getting these swarms as thay helps make up for all the hives we lost last winter. One swarm was a puny little thing and we combined it with a larger swarm.

We are starting to add honey supers to out hives. Any hive that you see in the above picture with 4 boxes has a honey super. We are hoping to have honey to sell by July 22. That is our target date for starting with the Phinney Farmers' Market. Finally the weather is looking like summer with days in the mid 70's and blackberry blossoms galore.

Bee Log 57: May 22, 2011

We have a new spot to keep bees. We are so excited to have a spot at the University of Washington Urban Horticulture Center. It is in an out of the way fenced area. I hope these bees do well enough to earn their rent!



Our own bees ready to go in a hive.



One of the members of the Puget Sound Beekeepers invited club members to his place to help install over 100 boxes of bees. Pictured above are some of the boxes waiting to be put in a hive.



We toured the honey house that the beekeeper had built. Notice the bees hanging out on our bee-suits. These bees don't know where they live.


It is hard to keep writing about dead beehives. Finally, I have something to say about nice lively beehives. We got 18 new boxes of bees. This brings out total hives up to 21. Out of 19 hives of bees, 4 survived. Two of those hives were so weak that we put them together as one hive. The queens fight and one queen will remain in that situation.

The new bees are all booming despite the cool weather. It will take a bit of time for them to build up to the place where we can take honey from them. Our first date at the Phinney Farmers' Market is July 1. Last year with a cool May and June we were not able to get to the market until August 1. I sure hope that is not the case this year. Lots of local beekeepers are out of honey. People are asking for it at the farmers' markets and not getting it.

Bee Log 49: October 14, 2010

Our hives are in 8 back yards around the north end of Seattle. This is one group. We plan to expand to another 3 backyards next spring.


Another group of hives.


My husband with a beautiful frame of capped honey. We were taking off the supers (top honey storage units on a hive) from this hive and getting the last of the honey for this year. The bees will still keep gathering honey on nice days but they get to keep it for their winter stores. Also, we wanted to get all of the supers off before the ivy started to bloom as the ivy honey doesn't taste or smell good.

The season is over. The supers have come off of the hives and the bees are being fed sugar water to make sure that they have enough stores for the winter. The last of the honey has been taken and extracted. This season has been a poor one due to the rainy, wet weather. We averaged about 25 pounds of honey per hive with some hives producing much more and others having no surplus honey at all.

I am already looking forward to next year's harvest. I have learned that I love the honey that is produced when the linden trees are in bloom. We have also discovered that we have a lot of linden trees in our vicinity. I know that I don't like ivy honey AT ALL. Ivy is blooming right now and the bees can have that honey for themselves for the winter. I am glad that ivy doesn't bloom when other important, tasty flowers are blooming. If you smell ivy flowers, that is just the way that ivy honey tastes! Yuck.

We loved being at the Phinney Farmers' market. We loved meeting people from the community and educating them about bees and honey. Thank you customers and supporters. I will go make sugar water so we can keep feeding the bees so they have lots of food for the winter.

Bee Log 47: September 13, 2010

Our honey in front of one of our bee hives.



Seattle has looked pretty gray all summer long.


It is a bad year for bees in Seattle. If you are a new beekeeper, I hope that you have not become discouraged. I can't imagine facing some of the problems that we have had this year as a beginner. The worst thing over the last month has been the cool weather. The bees just are not getting the flying time that they need. Also there are not many nectar sources this time of year. The bees are having a hard time getting enough to store and enough for me to take as honey.

We are hoping for another harvest to take us through the last 3 weeks of the Phinney Farmers' Market. We will see if we get it. I think the weather this week is supposed to be better than last week so at least we can get in the hives.

Bee Log 45: August 10, 2010

At last we have honey to sell at the Phinney Farmers' Market on Friday nights from 3 to 7pm. Look for us there.


My husband uncapping a frame of honey. Note the dark honey in the center of the frame. The bees were collecting from two different flowers.


The extractor with a frame of honey inside.


The garden is producing despite the cold summer that we have had in Seattle. Shown is an orange cauliflower.


Six year old Belle wants to be a beekeeper. Her parents brought her over to our house to look at the beehives. The bees were a bit scary but that did not deter her interest. I have to admit that I am a little afraid of the bees too. One should respect a stinging insect with a powerful venom inserted with a barbed needle connected to a pumping device.

All of our bee suits were all hopelessly too big for tiny Belle. It was raining so we had a really good excuse not to look inside a live hive. We did watch the bees at the entrance of the hive for awhile. We also looked at an empty hive with frames inside and at our honey extractor.

I hope that this interest in bees will grow into a lifelong hobby or business. One never knows with a 6 year old. One must be careful not to discourage good things because of youth.

Bee Log 42: June 24, 2010

My husband is showing a guest our bees. This young lady and her grandmother spend the afternoon with us looking at the bees and eating hamburgers. She showed a great deal of courage after she got stung through her jeans by going right back to look at some more hives.

Seattle has had a wet cold spring with lots of rainy days. The bees are not collecting much honey yet. We are hoping to be ready for the Phinney Farmers' Market on July 2 but I don't think we are going to have honey by that date. Some of the bee hives look like they are really low on food which is strange this time of year. We have had a few nice days this week so maybe the bees will be able to gather some of the currently abundant blackberry nectar flow.

Wallingfor Urban Honey becomes Seattle Urban Honey

We are changing the name of Wallingford Urban Honey to Seattle Urban Honey to reflect the fact that our hives are now going to be located throughout the Seattle metropolitan area. Thanks for your interest in this project. Look for us at the Phinney Farmers' Market.