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Protected: Beekeeping Course – Lesson Two
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Protected: Beekeeping Course – Lesson One
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Healthy Beehives Need the Proper Beekeeping Supplies
Raising a dog or cat takes very little specialized equipment, however beekeeping involves educating oneself regarding all the supplies, procedures and techniques for raising healthy bees. Improper education of apiary methods will put you and your beekeeping experiment in serious danger. Beekeepers avoid the potential dangers by simply using the right beekeeper supplies. The extraction and processing of honey requires specialized equipment however, any beekeeping guide worth it’s salt will tell you that the management and maintenance of a colony of bees will require specialized and proper beekeeping equipment. Sometimes the obvious needs to be stated, and in this case we always need to remember that the safety of the…
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cool bee pics
. Please have a look at this website, it’s full of beautiful photography. http://www.mytinygarden.com/ If you head to the “Fly” category, then to the “Bee” subcategory, the first picture there, a bee on a dandelion, took my breath away. Amazing photography at very close range. There are 10 other bee photos, that are also very well done, but that first one was the best. Enjoy! .
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teeny tiny hive
Here you see the hands of Ken, adjusting the frames of his little model beehive. The wee box is resting on the much larger, normal-sized beehive. Ken is going to leave the small box on the larger box – there’s an opening in the bottom so the bees can come up into it – so the bees will draw out the honeycomb a bit. He doesn’t want them to store honey in the little demo hive, but he does want them to show what they can do in building up the wax in preparation for honey storage. He brings this hive to places where he talks about bees, so people…
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something delicious
Take some runny honey and softened butter in roughly equal amounts and blend together with cinnamon. That’s it. If you love cinnamon, add lots. If you like it in moderation, just put in a pinch or leave it out altogether. One word of caution – don’t blend it too long or the butter will separate and give it a really weird texture. If you take this and mix it one part honey butter to two parts peanut butter, you will have what tastes like the inside of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Oh baby. I foresee some xmas goodies in my immediate future. I’m sure it can’t bee too hard…
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cleanup
A few weeks ago, I noticed that the bees in my observation hive had all died. This is not surprising, due to the fact that there are not that many of them and they are not able to huddle in a large enough mass to actually survive the winter. That’s what my regular sized bee colonies are doing right now – huddling together in the middle of the hive to stay warm; and, most importantly, keep the queen warm. She’s the one who will kick off the growth of the colony in the spring with her egg-laying, so it is vitally important to the colony to keep her alive. But…
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night night
. The time had come. Colder weather, shorter days… winter is coming and the honeybees needed more substantial protection than what their hive alone could provide. Enter tar paper (above), saved from last year. You can tell by the grooves and the tiny hole that it had already been used for this purpose. That made putting it on the hives a bit easier than last year, when I was fighting with a large roll of the stuff while trying not to get stung. This time I just followed the grooves and lined up the holes with the upper exits of the hives. Easy peasy. Here’s one papered and the other…
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gone in a day
. I sold a container of honeycomb to a friend a few weeks ago, and today she told me “It was gone in a day”. What a compliment! Comments like these make me want to expand my operation by about 4x. It’s a big decision, though, because it takes time and energy. And I’m still learning. Some days I want to give up the idea of selling honey and keep it all for myself – yes, I’m greedy that way – and some days I want to get a few more hives so I have more to sell to all the people who want to buy more when they finish…
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workshop review
. I was pleasantly surprised to discover recently that one of the people who attended my intro to honeybees and beekeeping workshops wrote a little review on her blog! Thanks Bianca! Inspired Wonder‘s honeybee workshop review. These workshops were geared toward families, so they were not highly technical nor were they designed to tell you everything you need to know to be a beekeeper. I’m more about raising awareness of honeybees and hoping to share the love. I also want people to know the difference between a bee and a wasp. When someone tells me they were harassed or stung by a bee I always ask, ‘was it a bee or…
