The life, death, and hopeful resurgence of a first year beekeeper's hive

Bees are by far the most difficult animal I have ever kept. They make everything else we have here seem like child's play. They are the only creature I have ever taken a class about and still feel clueless.

I realize the title to this post is kind of bleak, but I really hope things are on the upswing!

I'm sure we all remember my post in April when I got the bees. I was so excited! And even though everyone in our bee class said we wouldn't get honey this year, I was going to prove them wrong! LOL, no, Ellen!



We had a rocky start when a couple months ago my hive got robbed by another hive of bees. This was a Game of Thrones-esque battle between my bees, with their stores of honey and some crazy lady who goes out and feeds them sugar syrup at least once a week (me!), and the invading bees, who were probably from a weaker hive and wanted all the riches we had to offer. There were piles of dead bees everywhere, it was horrible, but my hive seemed to win the battle and survive-or so I thought.

Inspecting the hive shortly after the robbing showed that I didn't have a terribly huge number of bees, but everything else looked normal. We a good brood pattern, which is just the patten of how the queen lays her eggs. We had eggs, larvae and capped brood, which meant that even though I didn't see the queen, I had one and she was laying well. It looked like a hive on the upswing.

But, no.

In the the inspection of the hive just 3 weeks later, the number of bees had dropped drastically. Where there had been thousands, now there were hundreds. The brood patter was spotty, if there was any. There were dead larvae and no eggs. And it was just empty. Frames that had been full of eggs, brood, and bees were just completely empty.



My fear is/was the dreaded colony collapse disorder. Pretty much the worst thing to happen to bees in the past few years. And I still don't know that is what happened. Our beekeeping instructor will be out here in a week to help us get our hives ready for the winter, so hopefully I'll know more then.

But I said this was hopeful!

This brings us to last night. Our friend Renee had a bee hive in the roof of a house that needed some construction work done. Our plan was to lure the hive into a new hive and the plan was pretty much working, and I was crazy excited to get these bees! But of course, the construction got moved up a month and there was no time for the lure, they needed to be out yesterday. Great. And they are all the way up there:



Let's be honest, Craig, Renee's husband did the vast majority of the work. I freaked out a bit, then calmed down enough to be actually useful. I had to take these girls home and figure out what to do with them.



This morning I was out at 6 to start this project. According the University of YouTube, I was supposed to cut the comb with brood/eggs/bees from the hive we just moved so it fit into empty frames and so I did. It was so early that the bees were pretty chill. I just cut sections that looked salvageable, swept piles of huddled together bees that were on the lips of the box onto the frame, put them in the nuc box that my orginal bees came in. I searched for the queen bee in these big piles of sleepy bees, but never found her.



I took this full box of bees and all and put them all in my dwindling hive. I'm really not sure if I was supposed to do this, if this will start another Game of Thrones battle between the few bees in the hive and the ones I just put in there, I have no idea, I just hope some survive!



I'm just really glad Keith works til 7 today and that he's so busy for the next week that he probably won't need to use the pickup or go behind the greenhouse. I didn't get all the bees from all the boxes they were moved into my hive and there are so many bees in the back of the pickup, but I'll probably try to move them this evening. But it kind of feels like they're everywhere back there!.

Hopefully they stay, survive the winter, become a good hive for me next year. If not, no big deal I guess! I only got stung once in this whole process and that was only because it was dark and I didn't see a bee on the gloves I was putting on.

Until next time!

Cheesemaking season

So ya know when you're getting 2 1/2 gallons of milk a day and you're making all this cheese and all of the sudden your 2 wine fridges/cheese caves are so completely full that you start making all this stuff (cottage cheese, chevre, butter...) that you can pop in the freezer, but then thats full too! Yeah, me to!

Obviously the only thing to do is to massively upgrade the current cheese cave situation. So we did! Instead of 2 24 bottle wine fridges, we now have one 24 bottle wine fridge and one massive 80 bottle one! The smaller of the two will mainly be where I ripen and age blue cheeses, aka My Blue Heaven! The new big one is where pretty much everything else it!



There is a little over 50lbs of cheese in there and it's not even half full! It's mostly Romano, Gouda and Manchego styles, but with all the new space, I have room to play. I'm making my first batch of Brie of the season right now.

But it's not only cheese making season, it's also the season of struggling against the weather in the feeble attempt to grow fresh vegetables, aka gardening. It's been a weird summer, it gets too hot then it gets too cold (like it is today), and so many of the plants have just stalled out. But at least we have the greenhouse! Everything is thriving in there!



This is year is the great determinate tomato experiment. Instead of growing the normal, indeterminate tomato varieties that vine all over the place, I'm growing almost only short, stocky determinate plants. Since they take up less space, I was able to plant more than I usually do and it's been so nice to to not have to hack back the monster vines. But it is an experiment, I have no idea if the harvest will be similar to other years, but so far everything is looking good!

In animal news, we finally got the girls sheared! Of course it got cold and rainy for the week after they were sheared and they were pretty pissed at me! They've mellowed out and are fitting in really well with everyone else out in the pasture.



We're down to milking Margo just once a day now, but we'll still be milking Cupid twice a day for a while and there is a good chance that Melissa is prego, so she's getting trained on the milk stand and is learning like a champ!



I've got to go flip the brie, then harvest some onions. Hope you all are having a great Sunday!