Great reading for all bee keepers

Here is a link to a great article by David Holmgren (of permaculture fame) about the future of bee keeping and its important role.

http://www.holmgren.com.au/DLFiles/PDFs/Apiculture3.pdf

Happy beekeeping,

Sonya

the bees are here!

We picked up our four new beehives last night!

Finally we have bees - and very (very!) soon we'll have our first harvest of honey.

It was quite an event picking them up - we packed our beekeeping suits, gloves and boots - bought plenty of straps and emlocks for the hives.

We charged the torches and headed off at 4.30pm. We arrived and helped wrap the straps around the hives, we waited until just on dusk and then the owner tacked in a block of wood over the hive entrance to lock them in for the trip home.

We packed up the trailer with four hives and we packed four wooden stands, two honey storage buckets and boards for the tops of the hives in the car.

Strapped in tightly so they wouldn't move, we headed off to try to get home while there was still a little light left.

I had also copied the phone numbers from the DPI Queensland site of local beekeepers who will come out and help if you break down or heaven forbid have an accident while transporting bees.

I was really pleased to see that at the place where we picked the hives up from that they had a native bee hive in among the European bee hives - and had done so since 1987! So they can co-exist - which was great to see as I was a little worried about our native bees being pushed out or attacked by the honey bees.

Anyway, we arrived home after a slow trip and suited up, lit the smoker and started unloading them. It took a couple of hours to do - each hive had to be strapped onto a sack truck and carefully transported cross country to the bee pad my husband had built for them.

They were very, very heavy - already loaded with honey so we'll be harvesting that soon.

We finally got back inside at 8.30pm, exhausted I must admit. I always find it stressful to move things like that - I worry about everything that could go wrong, but with some good planning (and emergency phone numbers in my pocket) we were fine and it all went well.

Although it was hard heavy work and had to be done by torchlight.

My husband only suffered one sting (on his hand) - which I thought was very good given we are absolute novices, it was dark, there were four hives and we had sweat running into our eyes within our suits - don't get me wrong, the suits we have are excellent and I've highly recommend them.

So our beekeeping adventures have begun in earnest. I'll keep you posted on our progress.

Cheers,

Sonya

Another day spent learning about beekeeping

Yesterday was spent doing some very hands on learning about beekeeping. My husband and I got up early and headed out to meet with the beekeeper and we were straight into it spending the day checking the hives and harvesting honey.

We got there early because it was going to be a very hot day with a storm predicted for the afternoon (this is mid-summer in the subtropics) and we needed to tend to the bees well before that started to impact on them. Apparently bees get cranky when storms are coming and we didn't want to be disturbing bees when they were cranky.

We suited and gloved up, got the smoker going, got all the tools and spare hive pieces ready just in case and headed out. (Can you spot the Queen in the photo above?)

We smoked the hives, carefully removed the lids, checked the small hive beetle traps, killed any live beetles we saw and gently lifted the frames to see what was happening - was there enough honey to harvest or not?

You can see in the image above that there are no capped cells - they are all open. So this frame was left in the hive.

BELOW - you can see in the frame below that some of them are capped - when about half are capped, they were removed from the hive, the bees gently brushed off of them and then put in a spare super (the top box of a bee hive) which was in a wheelbarrow with a lid put on them to keep the bees out of them ready to head to go to the honey house to extract the honey.

We were shown how to methodically number the frames to ensure they are returned to the same hives, systems are important in beekeeping, recording honey flow, strength of the hives (population numbers and bee-attitudes) what's going on with broods, queens, pests and bee-activity in general. It helps you manage your hives and also lets you know what to expect when you crack open that particular hive lid.

ABOVE - The landing platform for the bees to access the hive and launch themselves from in the search for honey.

A frame after it has had the caps removed. You can see (and you could smell) the golden honey within.

The uncapped frames are then placed in an extractor where centrifugal forces draw the honey from the cells. This was an electric four frame extractor - we have a hand driven two frame one for our hives when we get them. We bought it at a 'tip shop' from one of the rubbish dumps here.

And there it is - the beautiful sweet golden honey, ready for straining and bottling. No heating, no processing, just pure honey straight from the bees.

The cappings are also collected and these are melted down to produce wax for cosmetics, candle making and for other goodies like furniture polish.

We also learnt how to put our nucleus hive together (it arrived in a flat pack with no instructions - nothing like a challenge!), so now we'll assemble this, paint it, choose the perfect place to locate it in the garden, prepare the site and set it up for it's new Queen and her colony.

It was a bit of a puzzle when it arrived and we had an idea of how it might go together, but we weren't sure. On the day we do assemble it, I'll take lots of photos and post them here in case anyone else has the same problem we had.

We'll get our new bees around October, so in the meantime, we'll keep learning as much as we can about beekeeping, how to do it properly, how to really care for the bees and how to do it all organically and wholistically.

There is a lot to learn, but if we can get a quiet hive that will be tolerant of a couple of learners we should be okay.

We'll also work on creating a bee fodder calendar to ensure we have food for them year round on our block.

Cheers,

Sonya

The Apprentice Beekeeper

Bargain find at the Tip Shop

We were lucky enough to hear about a great beekeeping find at the local tip shop. Like a lot of rubbish tips nowdays, there is a resource recovery shop attached, where saleable items are resold back into the community - this is where we found our treasure.

We called up to make sure it was still there and got them to put it on hold for us.

So - here's the bounty...
1 x hand driven two frame honey extractor (needs a good clean and a new drive belt)
2 x pairs of leather gloves (need new elastic in the sleeves)
1 x heavy duty hive tool
1 x normal hive tool
3 x veils to fit over hats
1 x capping bag to fit the extractor
1 x bee brush

All that for only $50!

To buy all this new, it would be over $800.

What a bargain, we're very happy with ourselves indeed.

And, we visited the local DPI beekeeping section and got hold of this book.

Next steps, a nucleus hive, a full beekeepers suit and a smoker.

And some bees of course!

Cheers,

Sonya