Spring 2016

The beginning of 2016 was pretty discouraging.  It looked like we had lost all but one hive.  After successfully relocating a swarm and discovering one of the collapsed colonies was indeed still alive, we were excited again.  With the addition of this new swarm, we are back up to 3 hives.

A swarm in a small tree.

Removing the branch with the swarm.

A bucket full of bees, ready to go home.

The bees are all settled into their new home.  We'll feed them sugar syrup for a few weeks to get them started.

Since the winter was mild and we did not harvest honey in 2015, we had an abundance to harvest early this spring.  It was our darkest, tastiest batch yet.  We harvested just over 2.5 gallons, which sold out very quickly.

Have you ever seen honey so dark?

Honey color scale.  Our recent batch was as dark as it comes!

We also redesigned our logo and labels for a more professional look for this batch of honey, and made available for the first time, a larger sized jar.  We hope to have another batch later in 2016.  Be sure to like our Facebook page for updates on our honey availability.

New logo and labels, and new large jar size.

2015

Not much beekeeping news to share in 2015.  We lost one colony (the split from 2014), and we added this little bee-bee to our family in June 2015. 

Sweet bee-bee Jolie.

Our little honey bee won a Halloween costume contest.

The Rest of 2014

2014 was full of learning experiences.  We learned how to replace a colony's queen bee, how to split a strong colony into 2 colonies, and we learned the importance of quality equipment.

We bought 2 new queens to replace a queen in a struggling hive and to split a second hive into 2 colonies.

Unfortunately, even after replacing the queen in the struggling hive, and providing supplemental feed, the colony never seemed to recover.  We realized later that the hive boxes didn't fit snug, which allowed other bees to sneak in and steal honey.  Presumably it also allowed a cold draft into the hive during the winter, making it difficult for the bees to regulate the temperature, and we ended up losing that colony.  A sad lesson learned.
 

The split was a success!

On a positive note, splitting our strong hive was a success, and the new colony grew so quickly, it nearly surpassed the size of our other hives in just one season. 

Jenée got stung twice throughout the season (both in the same week), so she now wears Gore-Tex pants over her jeans, which makes the job safer, but a lot warmer. 

The 2014 honey harvest was a lot of work, but a big success, and honey sold out very quickly, thanks to all our generous supporters.  We're looking forward to putting that "honey money" to good use in the coming years.  Maybe an electric extractor is in our future... hand-cranking the borrowed extractor for 5 minutes for each frame gets pretty exhausting.

An electric extractor might be a good investment!

Overall, the 2014 season was a success, with lots of lessons learned.  Thanks for your support of Bee Curious Honey!

Please enjoy these miscellaneous pictures from the 2014 season.

This bee seemed to like my artwork.

Ouch.  Maybe beekeeping isn't the best hobby for someone who's allergic...

Rainwater barrel with lots of algae provides a safe landing place for bees to collect fresh water.

Setting up the 2014 hives.

Have you ever wondered how thousands of bees are shipped?

A chunk of misplaced drone (male bees) comb that needed to be removed. 

New Beginnings: 2014

With a solid year behind us, and some "honey money" to fund new projects, we started the year by planting some of our bees' favorite flowers.  At work, I promoted bee-friendly plants, like Agastache.  At home, I planted an entire bed full of lavender and added a lavender plant under each tree in the orchard.
 

Bees love Agastache.
 

Of all the plants I see at work, lavender seems to bee a favorite.

We started 2 new colonies of bees with our "honey money".  We ordered the bees through our local beekeepers association.  Unfortunately, the price of packaged bees doubled since last time.  I prepped the old brood boxes (a deeper box where bees raise their babies and store food) for their new residents and bought a few supers (shallower boxes where bees store extra honey), in anticipation of a bountiful year.
 

Building and prepping the bee boxes is part of the fun.

I set up the new boxes, picked up the bees, dropped them in, and voila!  All done -- NOT!!
 
Starting a new colony, or in our case, two colonies, is a lot of work.  A new colony must build the comb from scratch while raising enough babies to keep their colony going and storing enough food to survive the coming winter.  This requires a lot of resources, so we try to provide as much as we can to give our bees the best chance of success.  

People looked at me funny as I strolled the grocery store with nothing but bottled water and bags of sugar in my cart.
I turned the sugar into syrup and filled each feeder inside the hives every couple of days.  I got stung twice in the first week.  (Now I wear Gore-Tex pants over my jeans!)

One hive exploded with growth, quickly building comb and filling it with eggs and honey.  The other hive filled with honey, but lagged far behind in eggs.  The bees began building queen cells, meaning the worker bees planned to replace their queen by raising a new one from an egg.  They do this when the queen is not performing her duties (laying lots of eggs).  When you think about it, it's kind of like impeachment.  

A beekeeper friend came out to give me a second opinion and confirmed my fear that the queen needed to be replaced.  Shipping is a big part of the expense when buying a queen, so I ordered 2, with the intention of splitting our biggest hive into 2.  In the meantime, I transplanted a frame of brood from the strong hive into the weak hive, otherwise many of the workers would have died from old age by the time the new queen's first batch of eggs had hatched.

It took a few tries, but I eventually got the queen replaced in the weak hive, and I split our big hive into two.  In the process, I harvested a couple gallons of honey.  This time I borrowed our club's centrifugal extractor, but it was still lots of work.  

This season hasn't been easy, but I've learned a lot, and I look forward to learning more! 
So far, everyone seems happy!
   

  
Would you like to purchase some of our sweet, delicious honey?

 

Our honey is unheated and natural -- just like the bees made it.  The best part is, our honey is not for profit.  Every cent of your Bee Curious Honey purchase helps honey bees by funding additional bee conservation projects, such as expanding our bee garden, and purchasing additional bee boxes, colonies and equipment. 

 

Please contact Jenée or Eric for prices. 

 

Battling Nature: 2012-2013

2012
The rest of the year
 

This year proved to be a challenging one for our bees.  Inexperience, coupled with an infestation of wax moths, ultimately led to the collapse of our wall cut-out hive.  To make matters worse, we also lost both of the newer hives.  One day they were there, and the next they weren't.  I attribute this to placing the hives in a location which was too shady, but also to my not feeding them enough to give them a fighting chance.  I'd heard that most beekeepers quit beekeeping by the third year, and I'll admit that losing most of our bees was highly discouraging, however, we decided to slow it down and focus on keeping our strong hive, strong.   
 

2013
 

We took a step back and let the bees do their thing, with great success.  Fortunately, we had good rain, and a bumper crop of wildflowers, so we ended up harvesting more than 2 gallons of honey from our original, remaining hive.
Thanks to you guys, we were able to save that "honey money" for a not-so-rainy day.
We also added a small orchard of about 20 fruit trees to the farm.  Peaches, pears, and plums -- oh, my!  The bees will love them in the spring!
 

 Oh, the taste of sweet, sweet success!

 It was a beary good season.

The Bee Curious label was created for our 2013 harvest.
 
 

Beekeeping: Our First Year, 2011

My first time wearing the beekeeping equipment.

2011
February

When our beekeeping supplies arrived in the mail, we were eager to get started.  We had spent many unsuccessful hours searching the Internet for bees to purchase.  We didn't know when we'd find some, but we wanted to be ready when we did! 

For the "new-bees" out there, a hive is basically a wooden box called a "hive body", if it's where the bees live and raise babies, or a "super", if it's strictly honey.  Honey is like the bees' winter pantry.  They work hard storing it all year, so they'll have plenty to eat in the winter.  Fortunately, they usually produce more than enough, so there is plenty to share with us!

Eric had a bright idea to assemble the frames with an air compressor.

The assembled hive, ready to be painted.

March

Fortunately, we didn't have to wait long.  Our friend, John, a fellow beginner beekeeper, captured a swarm of bees in his yard.  He and his son, James, brought them over and set them up in our new hive.

John and James setting up our hive with a swarm they caught.

We fed the bees with sugar water for the first couple weeks to give them a strong start.

Within just a few weeks, the bees had already filled several frames with comb and honey.

A few weeks later, we received a response to our Craigslist wanted ad for bees that we had posted several weeks earlier!  We purchased a second colony from a wall cut-out in South Austin.  (Good thing we bought an extra hive box!)

Our second colony was a wall cut-out from South Austin.  Eric got stung taking this picture!

Who says a beehive has to look boring?

This hive was a challenge to set up.  Since the bees were cut out of a wall, the honey comb wasn't in frames.  The pieces of comb were stacked and melted together in a plastic storage tub.  What a mess!  I don't recommend taking on this project as a beginner beekeeper.
The bees were pissed as I tried to break apart and organize the melted comb.  I stood up the pieces of comb vertically inside the hive box.  Eric got stung on the forearm while taking this picture.

At the local beekeeper's meeting the next week, a member recommended rubber-banding the pieces of comb into frames. 
Eric bravely took on this project. 

The bees attached the broken comb to the empty frames and eventually discarded the rubber bands.

We had a terrible drought the entire year of 2011, but both colonies managed to grow strong, despite a shortage of food-bearing plants.  We tasted the honey, but ultimately we didn't want to weaken the colonies, so we decided not to harvest the first year. 

We also learned a valuable lesson this year:  Eric is not allergic to bee stings, but I am.  Fortunately, we both survived and made it through the year with only 1 sting for Eric, and 3 for me.  I now have an epipen, just in case of a severe reaction, but as long as I take oral steroids shortly after being stung, the discomfort is minimal.

2012
February

Our hives struggled through the winter, and at one point, I panicked, fearful that the queen had died, after not seeing any eggs during my winter inspection. The population of the first hive dwindled to a small cluster the size of my fist.

Upon recommendation from a fellow beekeeper, I provided the bees with supplemental sugar water and a few protein cakes from Dadant.

We had the opportunity to purchase additional packages of bees through our beekeeper's association, so we ordered 3! A package of bees is roughly 3 lbs of bees, plus a queen bee -- a whole colony, in essence, and enough to start a new hive. By the time the packages arrived in March, I had talked a friend into buying one of ours to start her own hive, so we ended up with just 2 new hives.

Once again, we got a little creative with the paint job.  Don't "mess" with these bees!

We had a fantastic, rainy spring, which resulted in an abundance of wildflowers.  We added a 30' x 5' bee garden, rich in nectar plants, like Agastache and Salvia, and got the two new hives setup.  The new hives have been doing well, and our original beehive has been growing by the day.  The colony from the wall cut-out has been battling pests, like awful moth larvae that burrow into the comb, but they've still managed to fill up the original hive body.

July

The first hive from 2011 has grown so much that we decided to make our first honey harvest.  Unfortunately, we don't own much equipment, like a centrifugal extractor, so we had to do this the old-fashioned way:  crushing the honeycomb and then straining the honey.

One must have strong hands to squeeze all the honey from the comb.

This filter, which is made especially for filtering honey, is fine enough to filter out wax and debris, but coarse enough to allow pollen and other natural goodies to remain in the honey.  The size of the holes is similar to that of an inexpensive paint strainer.

Not bad for our first harvest.  This isn't even all of it!

The process of harvesting with little equipment was a tedious task.  Next time we'll probably rent the extractor from our local beekeeper's association.  
When all was said and done, we had 7 pint jars, 9 half-pints, and 27 tiny, 2-oz bear-shaped bottles.

We added a little piece of natural honey comb to each jar.

The honey looked beautiful in these classic canning jars.

We hope to sell some honey to fund additional bee projects.

Aren't these cute?  They're tiny, 2-oz plastic jars.

Would you like to purchase some of our sweet, delicious honey?

Your purchase helps fund additional bee conservation projects on our property, such as expanding our bee garden, and purchasing additional colonies and equipment.

Our honey is unheated and natural -- just like the bees made it. 

Please contact Jenée or Eric for prices.