Abundance

Late Spring and into Summer there is an abundance of flowers for my honey bees to visit. The honey supers fill up quickly as my bees build out new honey comb and bring in nectar ~ transforming the nectar into sweet amber honey. During this busy time honey bees only live about 5 or 6 weeks.

Nectar Flow & Pollen Collecting

Busy little bees just love Nectar Flow time! Nectar flow is usually during the early Spring to Summer when there is an abundance of flowers blooming and you will see bees buzzing here and there collecting the flowers' nectar ~ which they make into sweet, yummy honey. This year the nectar flow was earlier because of the warm temperatures in the late Winter.

Bees gather pollen and carry it in pollen baskets located on their hind legs. Pollen is used by bees as their protein food and to feed their babies/brood.

Healthy Bees make Happy Bees

My Mother's Day Hive was starting to really show some strength :) They were happy in their new hive which I placed facing South East to give them maximum morning sun. As I opened up their hive and looked into the deep, my little girls were very calm. This hive was a "sister" to my Scotts Valley hive, which was also very calm.

They had built out all the deep foundation with honey comb and it was time to place one of the honey medium boxes on top to allow them to start collecting nectar for their Winter pantry. Since this hive swarmed in mid-May I didn't plan on removing any honey from their hive. All the honey they made, they would eat thru the Winter. Honey bees create heat by shivering their wing muscles.

Those Pesky Ants!!!

When you live in an orchard in a very sweet smelling hive ~ well, you expect to have a few ant visitors from time to time. BUT sometimes the ant colony decides to make a run on your hives and it drives the bees absolutely crazy!!! You can hear them inside the hive buzzing and complaining!!! And when ants overrun a colony, your bees may decide to leave or abscond and move elsewhere.

Send in cinnamon to the rescue! Just sprinkle fresh ground cinnamon all around your hives ~ ants hate it and won't bother your hives again :) and your hives will smell super yummy!

Building Honey Supers

If you were a honey bee ~ would you want to make your honey comb on plastic or wax that smells sweet & yummy??? Well, of course the answer is wax !!!

It was time for me to build the honey super boxes ~ paint them fun colors ~ and assemble the frames that hold the wax foundation. And thinking of my bees and their preferences, I bought wax foundation. It is quite the process to build the frames ~ gluing the parts together, nailing them for strength and then gently inserting the wax. The foundation is embossed with the hexagon shape and this becomes their guide as they build their honey comb. The wax is held in place with small metal pins.
But honestly, these little girls can build perfectly shaped hexagon honey comb all on their own ~ this just speeds up the process for them.


The orange box is one of their medium honey supers and I'm working on building the frames/foundation. The other picture is a close-up of their honey comb.

2 Becomes 3

So why did my Scotts Valley hive swarm??? Because they were busting at the seams!!!

About a week before James brought the Scotts Valley Hive to my orchard, the queen laid an egg in the top of a swarm cell. The nurse bees filled the cell with royal jelly ~ which would be the new queen's nourishment for the next 16 days. The old queen had determined that the hive was getting too crowded and it was time for her to split off and start a new hive elsewhere. If we had added another hive box to the top about 4 weeks prior, the colony would not have swarmed. Their cozy home would have doubled in size and there would have been plenty of room for all the bees to live comfortably.

But there is something very interesting about this... I had hoped to place 3 hives in my orchard but James only had 2 to sell me. So 2 Becomes 3 :)

The white hive in my Scotts Valley hive ~ the grey hive is my San Francisco hive and the bright pumpkin orange hive is my Mother's Day hive.

Why Do Bees Swarm ???

If you ever see a swarm of honeybees ~ don't panic, don't run ~ just stand there quietly and watch the miracle of how honeybees divide and replicate themselves. When a hive is getting too crowded the honeybees create swarm cells, which actually look like peanuts. The queen lays an egg in the swarm cell and the honeybees start to create a new queen. About 1/2 the honeybees in the hive gorge themselves on honey in preparation for swarming. Scout bees fly out in all directions in search of a new home. All of a sudden the queen and about half the honeybees fly out of the hive and usually land and cluster within a short distance of the hive. Once the scout bees have located their new home the swarm again takes off and the queen and her honeybees create a new hive.

This queen cell was in one of my hives in April 2009 ~ I witnessed the birth of this queen and placed her in a hive that was queen-less. Without a queen, the hive will die off in about 10 weeks. Thanks Gilda for taking the picture :)

My Mother's Day Hive

Mother's Day 2008

5 days after my little girls' hives were put in my orchard ~ my Scotts Valley hive swarmed. My friend Lori and I were walking up my driveway when all of a sudden she shouted "STOP!". I looked at her and then saw what she was looking at ~ a large swarm of my honey bees were clustered on my orchard fence. OK ~ the queen and half of my Scotts Valley hive had decided that they were tired of living in cramped quarters and wanted to find a new home.

My learning curve on beekeeping just got steep!!! What do I do??? I was just getting used to looking inside the hive and had no idea how to catch a swarm of honey bees! I called Jeff who looks after the observation bee hive at the Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz. He gave me a few ideas on where to buy a hive, on a Sunday, on Mother's Day ~ of course, Frank Carrier in San Jose. So I give Frank a call and chatted with him a little bit. Drove over to San Jose, bought a hive, came home and put two coats of paint on the hive and placed it on my garden bench in my orchard.

Now, to catch the swarm and put them in their new home! Of course, I have my bee suit on and my gloves! First I sprayed them with sugar water ~ calms them down and they start cleaning each other :) Then I gently took an egg spatula and scrapped them into a cardboard box and quickly walked over to their new hive and poured them into their new home. I watched them move down deep, amongst the frames and foundation and disappear. It took me the rest of the day to gather all the loose bees flying around. But in the end, I caught the queen and the swarm and they were happy with their new pumpkin orange hive and I named them My Mother's Day Hive because they came to me on Mother's Day.

My Little Honey Bees

I'm so happy to be sharing my little girls' story with you!
Let me tell you why I became a beekeeper...

About 2 1/2 years ago I looked out at my apple trees in my orchard and noticed I didn't see any bees... where had they gone? This was before I heard about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and how our honey bees were disappearing... it was just something that struck me as "WOW, where are they?". I remember thinking back a few years earlier and how my apple trees were buzzing with bees amongst the apple petals gently falling to the ground.

My attention was drawn to honey bees and how they were always just "there" and now they "weren't"... I started on a quest to find someone who might want to place a hive in my orchard. A year later I found James, a local Santa Cruz beekeeper, and spent a day with him visiting his hives at UC Santa Cruz. It was at that moment when my heart went out to these wonderful little industrious honey bees and I made a commitment to become a beekeeper.

It took about a month to place two hives in my orchard ~ one from James and one from his father, Peter. On May 6, 2008 James and Heather delivered 2 hives to my orchard. I named one " my Scotts Valley hive" and I named the other "my San Francisco hive". Interestingly enough, my SF hive was painted grey, just like the foggy conditions my little girls had lived in prior to moving to sunny Scotts Valley.