Bee Log 65: September 5, 2011

Her Majesty was not deposed. The throne is still in the hands (wings?) of the nasty grumpy queen. We hunted all down through the hive-all 6 boxes and 60 frames of angry buzzing bees trying to find her. Then we went back up the whole six boxes looking again. We did not find her. We put the hive back together but took enough honey and empty frames out that there are now only 4 boxes. We will have to try again soon.

Bee Log 64: August 30, 2011

I am not happy today. This is the result of 3 bee stings to the face through my bee vale. I am puffed up like a chipmunk trying to stash seeds. I guess this goes with the beekeeping territory but I wish I did not respond so spectacularly.

We have a grumpy hive. This is usually due to genetics so the cure is to re-queen. That means that we have to go through 6 medium bee boxes (westerns) and find the queen. We are not using queen excluders this year so the queen, bless her non-heart blood system, could be anywhere in the tall,populous hive. That means really upsetting the bees to find her.

Last night we moved the hive after dusk from the host yard to a more remote location. We tried to secure all entrances immediately but the bees poured out a poorly secured top entrance. Then the front entrance plug came part way out. So we loaded a hive that had nasty bees crawling all over the surface. My husband got it in the ankles and wrists and I got it in the face each time my vale brushed the skin. We brushed the bees off of each other, got in the truck with our bee suits on and drove to the remote site. Unloading was as unpleasant as loading but at least we were alone and did not have to worry about the residents. Husband took a few more hits on the ankles. Boy those bees love his black fuzzy socks.

We stopped at a grocery store after all was over and I tried to find meat tenderizer made from papaya. I found some but it had salt in it and that did not sound too good so I bought a ripe papaya. When I got home, I cut off a piece and rubbed it all over my face concentrating on the sting sites. I also took Benedryl and ibuprofen and went to bed with an ice pack. I think the papaya helped.

It is overcast and threatening rain today so we will not attempt any search for the nasty queen today.

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 60: June 15, 2011

This is our Seattle Urban Honey logo on a sign at the farmers' market last summer. Our bees are not yet producing honey that we can take this summer. This might delay the July 1 date that we had hoped would be the debut of this season's honey.


Our bees are hungry. The blackberry bushes are just about to bloom as are the locust trees but they must be waiting for a nice day before they open. The maple and chestnut are finished blooming. The weather is still pretty cool with clouds, wind and some rain so the bees are stuck at home a good bit of the time. We looked through all of the hives last weekend and found that they all needed feeding because they were in danger of starvation. The population is booming in all hives so lack of feed is not a good thing. We did not have honey supers on any hives except the one surviving hive from last summer(in a yard in Bellevue).

We decided that since that hive is so populous and because it really needs feed that we would take this time to make a three way split. (You can't feed bees when there is a danger that the syrup might get stored as honey for human consumption. That is one of the ways that beekeepers cheat.) The bees were filling 4 western sized (medium)boxes. A fifth honey super (honey storage box) was pretty much untouched by the bees. We bought 2 new queens from Corky Luster Of Ballard Honey. We went through the hive and found the old queen in the third box from the bottom. She is big and beautiful. We set her aside along with a box full of bees and brood. She was going to go back on the old hive site. The rest of the hive was split into two roughly equal boxes of brood and bees. There was NO HONEY to divide up. Each box of bees got a second almost empty box on top and a feeder full of 2 gallons of sugar water (1:1 this time of year). The two new hives got a new queen inserted in a little screened box with a hard candy plug. By the time the bees eat the candy plug, they should be used to the new queen's scent. The queen will get fed through the screen.

The owner of the property had been asking for more bees. He had 4 hives last year, 3 of which died so he is happy to see more hives. This split will limit the honey that we could have gotten from such a vigorous hive but at the same time we were worried about the lack of honey and starvation. We should get three good hives and maybe some honey.

Bee Log 59: June 11, 2011

We caught a swarm on Thursday evening. The swarm was from our own bees at the Urban Horticulture Center. I did not think of getting my camera out until we had bumped the swarm into a 5 gallon bucket and poured the bees into a waiting hive. Here the bees on the inner cover of the hive are scent fanning, rears in the air and wings going like mad, to call the rest of the bees to the hive. The queen is inside the hive and the rest of the bees in the swarm are being informed of her whereabouts.



This picture was taken about 5 to 10 minutes after the first picture. Notice that almost all the bees are aiming toward the hole in the top of the inner cover.



It takes time to hive a swarm. We spent about 45 minutes to an hour waiting for the bees to march into their new home.



Almost all the bees are in the hive now. It is time to put the cover on the hive and to place the hive where we want it. The old queen will be in the hive with the swarm. The hive where the swarm originated will be raising a new queen. She will hatch within about 5 days. The new queen will then need a 70 degree day to get out to mate.


Bees in a bird house:

This cute little bird house belongs to friends of mine, J&B. It fell out of the tree where it was hanging and B went to pick it up and was quite surprised (understatement) when bees came pouring out. In general, we do not handle bees for people other than honey bee swarms but for close friends with bees in a bird house we do make exceptions. We were in a time crunch because we needed to be at a high school graduation so my husband with his bee suit on popped the whole bird house into an empty bee hive and left the hive sitting in J&B's yard so the rest of the bees could find their home that evening. My husband described the bees as fat and fuzzy. He knew they were not honey bees but did not have time or leisure for further identification.

After the graduation, we raced back to change clothes and retrieve our hive with unidentified bees. We plugged the entrance to the hive, strapped the hive together, took it home in the back of our pickup and left it there until morning. This morning, we located a place in a tree in our yard for the little bird house, suited up and placed the bird house in the tree.

The bees are a small bumble bee. I am glad that we saved them because we need native pollinators as well as the honey bees. I will try to get a picture of one of the bumble bees.