In Honor of National Honeybee Day . . .

newly-made honey dippers in front of one of our hives

It was a buzzzzzy week for us.

Last Friday, Bee and I got our first call ever to remove an active wild beehive.  A tree  had partially blown down in a wind storm the night before, tearing open the hollow limb in which the colony had built their hive.  Half the hive was in a branch on the ground, and the other half was still about 25 feet up in the tree.

While I cleaned up the chunks on the ground, Bee donned a tree-climbing harness over his bee suit and climbed a ladder up the tree.  It was fascinating to get to see how a wild hive is built: in long rows that can just be scraped away from the tree and removed in malleable chunks.

The rows of waxy hive that I rescued from the ground were mostly the colony’s brood and pollen stores, while the rows Bee removed from the tree were pretty much honey stores.  

My part, which was the main contingency of bees, went in a cooler that we then gave to another beekeeper to fortify a current hive he had. 

Bee’s part, being mostly honey, went in another cooler, which we took home and will eventually strain through cheesecloth to separate the wax cells from the honey.

straining wax through nylons, with honey draining into the jar below

After our awesome bee rescue, it was time to extract the honey from our own hives.  Last year we got about 4 gallons of honey.  This year, I am very sad to report, we got about two.  Between that and our pathetic vegetable garden, it’s just been a tough subsistence year for the Toxic Household.

Despite the lack of a honey-bounty, we’ve still been having fun collecting different varieties.

left to right - spun honey, almond honey, peppermint honey (all from a local apiary); honey-in-wax, strained honey (from this year's hives); 2 jars of honey (from the wild hive); "wild desert honey" (from Arizona); honey from last year's hives.

Now that we’ve extracted our hives’ honey, it’s time for us to start fattening up the bees and treating them for mites to help them survive the winter.  In order to fatten them up, we’ll be feeding them gallons of sugar water, in a ratio of a pound of water for every 2 pounds of sugar.  I can’t remember for sure, but I think it took about 7 pounds of sugar to make up a gallon of that sugar water, and we probably fed each hive at least 4 gallons last fall.

Which means I really ought to invest in sugar stock.