Bee Log #73

We had our first farmers' market of the summer tonight. It rained during the whole market. It didn't just do the Seattle mist thing, it rained. The temperature was about 55 degrees. For me, it was a six layer night. That means a combination of six shirts and jackets. I was warm even if I looked rather round. One undershirt, one short sleeved shirt, one long sleeved shirt, one fleece vest, one fleece jacket and a gortex rain coat.

We actually sold more honey than I expected to sell. We paid the stall fee with a bit left over so not too bad for such a cold wet SUMMER????? night.

Bee Log #72

We had another swarm yesterday, the 18th of the year. It was about 10 feet up in an alder tree and very accessible (unlike one that we got out of a blackberry thicket earlier in the week). The order of the pictures seems to be out of my control. The first picture is dumping the bees into a waiting hive, the second picture is the swarm in the tree before we touched it and the third is placing the bucket under the bee swarm just prior to bumping the branch to get the bees into the bucket. I am hoping that the blogger program is again allowing me to separate paragraphs with the enter button.

We will be at the Phinney Farmers' market today, Friday, June 22, from 3 to 7 pm.

Bee Log 71

We are introducing a new look for Seattle Urban Honey. When you have a designer in the family, these things happen. We liked our old flying jar look (see the previous post) and we like our figure 8 bee. What do you think?

This Friday, June 22, 2012, we will have our honey at the Phinney Farmers' Market. The honey in the picture was harvested at the Center for Urban Horticulture where we currently have 11 hives. What is the floral source? Big leaf maple, black locust, fruit trees, raspberries, chestnut are possible sources. The market is from 3pm to 7pm. Come see us.

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 # 69

What is the state of the hives this summer? Booming. We have captured 15 swarms and have started a new apiary on a farm near Carnation, Washington. If we can just convince the farmer to move his burn barrel a little further from the hives, I think we can get a load of honey and help the near-by vegetable farmers at the same time. It has been warm and sunny just enough for the bees to get out and forage. The black locust trees are blooming right now and the blackberry is just about to come out. The Carnation farmer reported that the bees were all over his locust tree. I have included a few more images of the large swarm that we caught.
Here you can see the bees fanning to let the other bees know where the queen is.

Bee Log #68

Flat Stanley came to Seattle from a young relative in Pennsylvania. He got to visit a bee swarm when he was here.

We were just delighted to get into our hives in late March and find that most of them had survived. This is a good looking bunch of bees ready to go after the first pollen and nectar that they can find.

This was a huge swarm about 25 to 30 feet up in a pine tree. We got this swarm by using a 12 foot orchard ladder and a bucket taped to the end of a 20 foot aluminum painting pole. Those bees can feel pretty heavy at the end of a long pole!

We had lots and lots and lots of swarms in late April and early May this year. They were all from our own hives as far as I know. This was the weirdest swarm. It left the hive on a rainy day and landed on the edge of a garden bed. Our happy news this year is that we lost only 4 out 24 hives last winter. The previous winter we had lost 18 of 19 hives so this was a great improvement. The big loss was probably from colony collapse. This winters losses were from running out of food. Out hives looked really robust when we went through them in March. Some of them were making bees like crazy as we found out when they started to swarm. We currently have 34 hives. We bought 5 packages so that means that we caught 13 swarms. Twice, we caught 2 swarms in one day.

Honey (and Craft) sale: Bee Log 67

Honey for sale.

Please join us for conversation, coffee and a chance to do some truly local Christmas shopping. I make the jewelry and my friend (and hive host) Clara makes the soap in her northgate area home. The bees that make the honey are here in Seattle.